Synergy and Socials

Seeing as I typically work in design-based roles it was really important to me that we had a clear and strong marketing side that flowed across platforms. I started with the Instagram as it's a visual project I thought it was important to have a strong profile on a visual platform.

I started by looking at different fonts (all copyright free) definitely a cursive font as visually I felt a though thee font should look like the birds children often draw; which for some unknown reason I can't find an example of so please enjoy my 3 am digital doodle to the left.

I prepped to page of varying fonts to present to the group and we all unanimously decided on the perfectly named 'Nightingale' font. I then emailed the font creator, from the email address I'd created for the film, to double-check that we were free to use it and sadly we never got a reply but based off of the copyright files attached with the file we're safe to use it.

I knew from the beginning I wanted to keep all the colours crisp and cool-toned. We were filming in a coastal location, in early winter and Kay had a lot of seagulls and pigeons in so blues, greys and white was a logical colour palette.

The main aim of the Instagram feed was to get people interested in the project and to click on the link to either the Indiegogo or website in the bio. With this in mind, I made sure each individual post would make up a bigger image on the full profile. The first strip (as shown below) simply introduced the film and the Polaroid imagery.

I'm definitely a fan of using stylised photography especially analogue in conjunction with digital film work as it adds a homemade crafted texture to a modern look. The initial polaroids were created using an app called Nomo and were then imported into one image sized to three Instagram posts and once the text and feathers were placed this was saved, duplicated and cropped down into the three images.

I also created the credits with the same font and Polaroid-style; this time the majority were scanned Polaroids that I had taken on set and a few from an old digital camera taken on set. These were placed on a green background that Stan could later chroma key out to overlay the credits on B-roll footage.

Finally, the poster. We wanted the poster to fit in with the imagery of the marketing campaign but we didn't just want to pull a still from the film and call it a poster.

Kay had already given me free rein to use images from her WallyAWOL Facebook page I, therefore, had access to hundreds of images of the birds that Kay has rescued/cared for.

After downloading a large selection of these images I cropped and resized each to be 10cmX15cm on Photoscape, which I then began sorting into colours as those

with more blue and grey tones would be in colour in the final poster and the remainder black and white; I wanted tonal differences in the black and white so I had to sort out the primarily red images as these would appear a lot darker in the final edit. The first edit used unedited versions of the colour images (See below left), it just didn't look finished and the text at the bottom was difficult to read in such a thin font.

I took the central panel in Photoscape and edited the colours to lean more towards blues and greens and added a little texturing like those found on old photos or like the reflective shine in a polaroid. I also brightened up the Polaroid frame to create more contrast whilst thickening the font for the bottom text and adding in the logo I had created for the Clipped Wings accounts to use in place of profile pictures.

This second option (middle) still didn't feel quite right, so for the final version, I added a hazy layer to the black and white images using a light grey and the spray paint tool on a lower opacity, a higher opacity underneath the text (see right), the finished poster can also be seen on our imdb page.