ABOUT

Bureau created a visual identity and a range of promotional material for the inaugural Sunderland Shorts Film Festival, which took place in July 2015.

Using an interchangeable palette of red, white and blue, the identity is also based around a distinctly American typeface to provide a link to the festival's origins: a cultural exchange project with Sunderland's sister city, Washington DC.

As a new festival, Sunderland Shorts had no existing visual assets or resources at its disposal, requiring us to work from the ground up.

We created a large set of illustrations of objects synonymous with filmmaking and cinema, which when paired with the colour palette, formed a bright, flexible identity, allowing us to produce materials with energy and variety.

To reflect Sunderland Shorts' growth and development in 2016, and influenced by research showing that the festival was attracting an older audience than originally hypothesised, Bureau employed the festival's growing image library to project an air of maturity.

The images chosen reflect the diversity of filmmaking styles, voices and genres that Sunderland Shorts is becoming known for.