The Seattle International Film Festival presents more than 400 films from around the globe in just over three weeks. Our task was to generate excitement for the festival among cinephiles, while also making it feel more approachable for a mainstream moviegoing audience. We were tasked with creating a show-bill poster, a theatrical trailer, out-of-home executions and a visual tool kit for additional promotional materials.

The theme of the poster was “Like Moths to a Film.” To make the breadth of films more accessible, the festival is broken down into different film genres. So we represented each genre with a different moth. All of the moths were created by local artists, including puppeteers, costume designers, and even burlesque performers. And the centerpiece of the poster was a one-of-a-kind, handblown, incandescent light bulb made by Dylan Kehde Roelofs. We shot as much of the poster as we could practically and in camera, including lighting the bulb on a pitch-black set lit with a Tesla coil. We needed to make sure the poster had a special, unique feel because it is also for sale at the festival, and is purchased by hundreds of collectors each year. So the bar was high.

Our SIFF clients (who, by the way, are the best clients anyone could ask for) were ecstatic about how well the poster conveyed the energy of the festival and visually tied together the various other campaign elements.