Color Harmony: Packaging

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Northwest Film and Video Festival

PLAZM

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The Northwest Arts Center is “a

regional media arts resource…

founded to encourage the study,

appreciation, and utilization of

the moving image arts, foster

their artistic and professional

excellence, and to help create a

climate in which they may fl ourish.”

To this end, the center created the annual Northwest Film and Video

Festival in Portland, Oregon. Now in its thirty-fourth year, the event

brings together leading professionals in the film industry with up-

and-coming independent fi lmmakers living in the Northwest United

States and British Columbia, Canada. The goal of this festival is to

give voice to original, creative fi lmmaking outside of the Hollywood

machine, and more specifi cally, to the local fi lmmaking body with an

audience of local moviegoers.

A great deal of the character of this fi lm festival was established by

evoking elements of northwest culture. Since 1999, Portland design

fi rm Plazm chose imagery pertaining to either fi lm or the geographic

region for its designs for one-sheet posters, trailers, advertisements,

T-shirts, tickets, programs, and theater slides for the festival.

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Design for Special Events

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Plazm began working with the festival in its twenty-sixth year, creating

a poster showing twenty–six individual theater seats, each with a

slightly different style, showing the evolution in seating design over

the festival’s twenty–six year run, a departure from the expected

fi lm festival imagery of fi lm canisters, negative reels, or cameras.

The following year, Plazm designed a series of posters, each depicting

a stylized, one-color illustration of a different northwest fi lmmaker

accompanied by a quote about their work. The next year, Plazm

designed a poster that re-created multicolored television test pattern

cards, perhaps to speak to the fact that this festival is not only about

fi lmmakers, but also incorporates artists who shoot on video.

Using a photographic approach, the twenty–ninth annual Northwest

Film Festival poster manipulated the verbiage of a Forest Service

sign that might be found in the middle of one of the northwest’s

lush, beautiful forests. The wit and simplicity of Plazm’s design lent

itself perfectly to other media and was adapted for use on a T-shirt,

provided the location for a television ad, and inspired the trees and

other foliage used to decorate the opening night party. They tried,

although unsuccessfully, to get the Forest Service to make them an

actual sign for the event.

For the thirtieth anniversary poster, Plazm used an illustration of a

tree stump with its many rings exposed as a metaphorical timeline for

the life of the festival, marking signifi cant moments in the history

of the festival and fi lmmaking in general. With both sincerity and

a sense of humor, they pointed out such milestones as: the inaugural

year of the festival; the year they rejected a fi lm that later won an

Academy Award; the year they opened the submissions criteria

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Case Study: Northwest Film Festival

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to include British Columbia; and the year that Final Cut Pro was

released, making everyone a “fi lmmaker.” Part of the beauty and

character of this particular poster was that it very easily and simply

showed the character of the Northwest Film Festival and its supporters.

Plazm has married the goals and personality of the Northwest Film

Festival so simply and astutely that, year after year, they are able to

design pieces that are both eye-catching and suited to the event they

promote. They have perfectly illustrated the goals of the fi lm festival:

to give voice to independent fi lmmaking that is distinctly northwestern.

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