Case Study · Visual Creative & Campaign · Tauranga, NZ

A campaign built
to run without me

Film Festival · seven-month campaign · 2027 edition

Full creative authority over the 2027 edition of a New Zealand film festival, working as a volunteer alongside one other person. Not a poster: a visual language, a format system, eight reels, five handover kits, a seven-month calendar and the documentation that lets a team of two run all of it after I stop.

Art Direction Campaign Strategy Design System Brand Identity Motion & AI Video Copywriting Handover Documentation

RoleVisual creative, full authority

TeamTwo people, no media budget

SpanSep 2026 → Mar 2027

Two of the four campaign reels. Sound off by design — they play in a feed.

The brief

Two objectives, and every single piece is judged against them: fill the seats, and establish the festival's presence in a city that barely knows it exists.

Seven programme strands across seven days, an international submissions window, filmmakers to court, sponsors to convince and a local press to reach.

The constraints

Two people doing the work. No paid media at all. Volunteer labour that cannot be assumed until someone is named. An audience where only about a fifth is local.

And the real one: at some point I stop, and whatever is left has to keep working in the hands of someone who is not a designer.

The answer

A system rather than a set of pieces. One visual rule that generates every asset, masters that regenerate every format, templates for the information that does not exist yet, and a kit — folder plus guide — for each job that someone else will have to do.

124Files produced

117Ready to publish as they are

13Delivery folders

7Months of campaign

Five months of production. Of what is not finished, almost nothing is blocked by design: eight pieces are waiting on a single field — a venue, a date, a set of sponsorship figures — and each is one edit, not a rebuild.

The idea

Two objects, one light, a third form that belongs to neither

The festival's subject is what happens to people who live between cultures. The literal answer would be to blend two things into one, and the literal answer is wrong: fusion erases both sources.

So the rule is optical instead. Two distinct, intact objects are lit by a single hard source, and their overlapping shadows cast a third form — a creature that exists in neither object. Nothing is merged. The new thing appears in the space between.

A gold seam runs through the point where that change happens. Gold is never decoration here; it marks the state change, and that single rule is what keeps the campaign from collapsing into generic black-and-gold luxury.

A desk lamp and an umbrella cast overlapping shadows that form a crane, with a gold seam at the join

The rule, in one image. A desk lamp and an umbrella, both intact and both recognisable. Their shadows meet and a crane appears that is in neither of them. The gold sits exactly at the join.

The permanent language is the seam between worlds. Gold as a material belongs to this edition only.

From the identity documentation

Three constants are locked across all seven days: the colours, the typefaces and the fracture. Everything else varies.

Why seven strands needed no new identities

The motifs

Everyday objects, lit until they become something else

Four creatures anchor the campaign. Each poster is a creature assembled from ordinary objects — a desk lamp and a watering can become a crane, headphones become a butterfly — lit from a single hard source against a dark ground, with a thin gold seam running through it. The silhouette has to read from across a street and survive a crop to a vertical story.

Crane

Butterfly

Dandelion

Jellyfish

Headphones and a fountain pen casting a butterfly

Headphones and a fountain pen. The gold seam runs along the body, where the two shadows meet.

A bicycle wheel and a lamp casting a dandelion

The dandelion — the motif whose motion caused the most trouble, because the seeds have to rise.

A lampshade and a mop casting a jellyfish

A lampshade and a mop. Same light, same distance, same wall: the set is shot as one system.

Each motif exists as a portrait master and a wide master, because 16:9 is a different composition, not a crop.

The format system

Five families, and what each one is actually for

Scaling happens inside a family, never across it. A3 to A1 is exactly 200%; a landscape frame cannot take a centred portrait stack, so 16:9 gets its own left-hand column instead of a squeezed version of the poster.

Family	Ratio	Master	What it is for
ISO A	1:1.414	1754 × 2480 px	Print: A3 in the hand, A2, A1 and A0 on the wall
Street	2:3	1200 × 1800 px	Mupi, panel, roll-up and the 1080 × 1620 digital version
Social	4:5	1080 × 1350 px	Feed. The format that sells the image
Story	9:16	1080 × 1920 px	Reels, stories, shorts. Type sits inside the safe area
Wide	16:9	1920 × 1080 px	Venue screens and web banners. A separate composition, not a scaled poster

Scale inside a family

Select the frame and scale; never resize. Scaling multiplies type, strokes and spacing with the canvas, so proportions hold at every size.

Protect the third form

Every frame carries a hidden safe band. The silhouette and the gold seam stay inside it, or the vertical crop decapitates the creature.

Re-lay the information

The information block is rebuilt per family, not scaled. That is why the widest format has its own left column rather than a centred stack.

Motion

Eight reels made by one person, with AI kept on a short leash

The creatures had to move without becoming photorealistic animals, which is exactly what generative video wants to do. The workflow that survived contact with reality: never name the animal in a prompt, never send a full composed plate to the model, generate the creature alone on pure black, and composite it back by hand using the fracture as a wipe.

01 · Stills

Silhouette frames

Base images generated from descriptive geometry, never from the name of the creature.

02 · Animate

Creature on black

Motion generated in isolation so the composition cannot drift. Flat, paper-cutout behaviour, never gaining thickness.

03 · Composite

Fracture as wipe

The gold seam is the transition itself: the state change reveals the new form.

04 · Assemble

Edit, grade, sound

2.5D camera, the campaign's sonic signature, audio at −14 LUFS. Delivered 9:16 and 4:5.

Crane

Butterfly

Dandelion

Jellyfish

Four reels, one per motif, each ending on the gold seam opening into the next state. Published 9:16 for Reels, Stories and TikTok, and re-cut 4:5 for feed.

Practical lesson worth more than the tool list: when the physics fight you — a dandelion that has to rise, not fall — you do not negate gravity in the prompt, you give the model an analogous prior it already understands, like ash rising from embers.

The delivery

Everything is one of three things, and the folder tells you which

Finished pieces get published as they are, on a date. Kits are a folder plus a guide, handed to someone else so they can do a job without me. Templates are built now and filled in later, when the information exists. Thirteen numbered folders, source masters locked away in the first one, and nothing ever published from it.

Press kit

Six images with captions and the first release, plus what may and may not be changed in a press text by someone who is not writing it.

For whoever contacts local press

Filmmaker kit

Laurel, selection card templates and a share pack. One card per selected film: duplicate, drop in the still, three fields, export.

The piece that keeps working after we stop

Sponsorship kit

One-pager, approach emails and a welcome pack, built around the fact that the city is small and in-kind beats cash.

For whoever walks into the businesses

Profile & activation kits

Instagram highlight covers and story sets with a twenty-minute setup guide, and the printed pieces for the street day.

For the publisher and the volunteers

The calendar

Seven months, and one month that carries the rest

Each piece was designed for a moment, so the calendar is part of the design rather than a schedule bolted on afterwards. It is written as a suggestion: the people running the festival know their audience better than a design document can.

Sep

Campaign opens

First four reels and the launch carousel. Sponsorship approaches begin — the window closes in November. Analytics baseline recorded, so March has something to measure against.

Oct

Submissions push

Second batch of four reels, captions escalating towards the entry deadline across the set.

Nov

Entries close

Main deadline, then the extension. Whatever replaces the street activation has to be decided and resourced now to exist in December.

Dec

The street, then stop

One summer date in the city centre. Programme announcement and on-sale dates confirmed, because the filmmaker letter cannot go without the first. Then a real break.

Jan

The hard month

The filmmaker kit goes out. One card per selected film takes days, so the film list has to be in hand in early January, not on the day. This is the biggest lever in the plan and February does not recover it.

Feb

Selling the festival

Guest and jury cards, film reels, session cards once times and venue exist. Sponsors are approached again, this time with results instead of a plan.

Mar

The festival, and the report

Seven days, countdown pieces, the wall of third forms in the foyer. Then the post-festival report, whose raw material is the press log and the analytics against September. It is what renews the next edition.

The handover

Documentation written for the person who picks it up, not for me

Three bilingual interactive documents hold the campaign together: where everything is, month by month what gets used and what must be ready before it, and an honest picture of what is finished, what is waiting on one field, and what has not been started.

Each kit carries its own start guide inside the folder, so handing over the folder hands over the explanation with it. Colours, dates and the domain live as variables in the design file: change one, and every piece updates.

Everything here is a suggestion. If something doesn't fit, the plan is wrong, not you.

Opening note of the handover documents

That sentence is the design decision I would defend hardest. A volunteer team does not need a designer telling them how to run their festival; it needs material that works and permission to change the parts that don't.

The origin seal

The identity device that travels without the hero image

Not every surface can carry a full poster: a tote, an embroidered cap, a single-colour stamp on a programme, a partner's footer. The seal is a mark of origin in three weights — full, compact and line — built to hold at 20 mm and to survive engraving, foil and one-colour print.

It never replaces the festival wordmark and never sits on top of the hero image. It is the quiet half of the identity, and the half that ends up on most of the physical objects.

The origin seal in its three weights: full, compact and line

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A campaign builtto run without me