Safar Film Festival

Client: Arab British Centre

The SAFAR film festival is dedicated to cinema from across the Arab world and consists of online and cinema screenings of Arabic films, documentaries and talks from a long list of highly talented Arabic film makers.

Brief:

This edition of the SAFAR film festival was a little different to previous years in that it was set to be a predominantly online event as a result of COVID. As such, as well as a promotional trailer, the Arab British Centre wanted to create a microsite to act as a portal for the virtual events as well as an event specific ticket store for all screenings.

With any website projects I enlist a talented developer to help me transition the design to reality and in this instance I had the pleasure of working with the very talented Kate Williamson. The site is one of only a handful that I have been tasked with creating, I have my fingers crossed that a few more projects get sent over in the coming years, they’re great fun.

As much fun as designing for online was, it can’t compete with animation and this trailer was an absolute joy to put together.

I’m a big fan of bold shapes, bright colours and geometry and the SAFAR brand was such fun to work with. I can’t pick out a single favourite frame as I love the compositions on so many of them.

If I was a lecturer teaching design either for motion or print, this is the sort of stuff I would teach. Take a square, a circle, a line, two pieces of text and three colours and lay them out in five different ways. This project took me back to my early years of discovering graphic design and I loved every single second of it.

Although this SAFAR film festival has already ended, you can see the program here. It’s an incredible event and I highly recommend you sign up to the newsletter for updates on the next one.

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