In Fall 2019, a group of sophomore visual communication students, under my supervision, spent the entire semester designing a full-fledged campaign for the Reel Palestine film festival. Reel Palestine is a non-profit annual event dedicated towards celebrating Palestinian culture through film. The highly anticipated 9-day festival has been taking place in multiple venues around the UAE, including Sharjah Art Foundation, Warehouse 421, and Cinema Akil in Alserkal Avenue since 2014. The students were required to interpret the ethos of the festival and represent it visually through a poster, brochure, social media posts, screening intro, roll-up banners, and festival merchandise. The project was divided into four phases:

Independent Work

Phase 1 - Graphic Translation

This phase focused on exploring various methods of visualizing the title of the festival. The students were required to utilize basic graphic form and representational form to communicate the full capacity of the two terms Reel and Palestine individually.

Phase 2 - Campaign Identity

This phase was a synthesis of the ideas developed in phase one to create an identity for the festival. The students were required to articulate visual and textual information by exploring relationships between images and typography in a poster.

Group Work

Phase 3 - Marketing Collateral

Students developed strategies that adopt the visual language of the poster to other marketing collaterals such as a brochure, social media posts, screening intro, roll-up banners, and festival merchandise.

Phase 4 - Production

Students prepared ready-to-print files for production. Students were also required to follow instructions provided by the festival committee and their designated printing press.