USC Femfest 2022
CREATIVE DIRECTION, GRAPHIC DESIGN, AND ANIMATION
MADE WITH: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and Blender.
MISSION STATEMENT: “SAGE’s (USC Student Assembly for Gender Empowerment) FemFest aims to be an inclusive safe space that highlights those oppressed by the patriarchy in the music industry. Intersectional at our core, FemFest is open to everyone, and specifically amplifies the voices of women, people of color, and those within the LGBTQ+ community.”
I served as the creative director for Femfest 2022. I worked with my team members to create a new brand identity for the festival, created templates and posts for our social media, designed the show poster, and created an animated loop to project day of show.
Event Poster
While planning my direction for the event, I was equally inspired by energy and humor of Riot Grrrl zines and middle school yearbooks. For the poster, my goal was to create controlled chaos – something which balanced legibility and messiness. I followed a simple grid-like layout in order to quickly communicate the key information, before skewing all of these elements to add this feeling of chaos and rebellion. I chose to use a concert photo of legendary punk vocalist, Alice Bag, as her life and ideology perfectly embody the ethos of Femfest. I then added doodles and stickers to fill in the areas around this main image. For color, I strategically added pops of green, blue, and yellow to contrast the pink background and draw the viewer’s eye up and down across the poster.
Layout planning
Work in progress
Final design
“Femfest Class of 2022” Team Highlights
We made these graphics to introduce each of our team members! We styled each one as doodled-over year book photos.
Day of Show Information
Instagram Story Templates
Used for polls, small announcements, and sharing our curated Spotify playlists!
Artist Announcements
Logo Projection
Leading up to the show we had to cut stage projections due to budget restraints. However, when I realized on the day of the show that I was able to access a small screen and projector I began working! By the time I got the screen and set it up, it was around 3:30pm (less than 4 hours before sunset). Now it was just time to make something to project…. I decided to do a pre-rendered loop given the time restraint. As a starting place, I decided to rely on our motifs of middle school and DIY crafts. I found a royalty free classroom by Mumladze on CGTrader, and began creating a 3D version of our logo. To create the clay look I used displacement and Doublegum’s Clay Doh shader. I set the Clay Doh shader to animate its surface at half the frame rate of the other movement to give it a stop motion feel. In order to get the most variety of animation in the least amount of time possible, I created a day to night cycle and changed the lighting inside the classroom accordingly. I composed the camera movement in order to slowly reveal different areas of the classroom and hide the day-night cycle resetting. I animated the logo to follow this movement with slight speed differences so that the camera is always viewing the logo from a slightly different angle. I then worked on getting my render time down without losing quality (quite the challenge on just my laptop). While the sequence was rendering, I drew short cell animations in Procreate. When the render had finished, I composited the cell animations and some other VFX onto it. I copied the loop three times and sequenced these effects at varying points in order to add more variety and make the loop feel less repetitive. Then I set up the projector with a little time to spare!