Ethera Music Festival & AR Experience

Branding, Animation, Augmented Reality
A transit shelter at night showing Ethera's music festival poster mocked up
Overview

Ethera is a fictional music festival that brings listeners into a world of cinematic, fantastical sound. This project aimed to create a cohesive set of promotional material for the festival through posters, AR, and social media posts.

Year

2022

Timeline

4 Weeks

Roles

Research, Ideation, Design, Animation, Augmented Reality

Tools

Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Aero

Challenge

To create the promotional campaign for a music festival with a focus on instrumentals

Ethera is a music festival bringing listeners in a world of cinematic, fantastical sounds. If you can imagine the soundtrack of a fantasy movie that draws you in to a whole new world, that’s exactly what this music festival hopes to accomplish.

The songs all rely heavily on the instruments, but when vocals are included, the music can be especially haunting—transporting listeners into a surreal, dream-like place away from reality and staying in their minds long after.

The music festival features three artists: Eurielle, CLANN, and Auri.

An banner of a crown with an eye in the middle with the word 'Ethera A Cinematic Music Festival' at the bottom
The Concept

Flowy shapes and archways

The music for Ethera brought to mind elegant, elaborate, and wonderfully strange shapes and imagery which I wanted to capture throughout all the music festival collateral.

I also took inspiration from Ethera’s venue, The Orpheum, a music venue in Vancouver with an enchanting atmosphere and beautiful architecture.

On the left, mood board compiling various images of posters and artwork with swirls and intricate details. On the right, poster process work with pencil and in Adobe Illustrator
The Posters

From light mode to night mode

Ethera ended up having one poster with two variations—one light, the other dark. These two contrasting versions would be integrated into the AR concepts.

The two final posters for Ethera, one with a lighter colour scheme and the other with a darker colour scheme. The posters have a crown with an eye, wings, and various other swirly and elegant shapes
A gif showing mockups of the light version and dark version of Ethera's music festival poster on a transit shelter during daytime
Augmented Reality

Using Adobe Aero to add layers and depth to the promotional posters

Ethera’s AR experience concepts includes slight animations and a colour change from the light to the dark version of the music festival poster when a user interacts by clicking on any diamond shapes.

More dimension can be seen when viewed through an AR lense because of the arrangement of the layers, giving the experience more depth.

Sketches of the augmented reality concepts for Ethera and the final AR assets, all elements pulled from the poster design
A concept for the AR feature where the AR elements turn dark when someone taps on the diamond
Social Media

Creating another digital aspect of the music festival campaign

Ethera’s social media campaign uses elements from the posters to create stories, reels, and posts for online promotion. The reels also show viewers how the AR works when paired with the physical posters.

The final Instagram posts for the Ethera music festival
A gif of the final Instagram post, reel, and stories for the Ethera music festival
Reflection

Building out the full experience

I had a lot of ideas that I wasn’t able to fully flesh out for this project. In the future, some additions I would like to make include: creating and recording the full AR experience complete with music, making a stronger social media campaign and filling out Ethera’s Instagram profile page, and designing some fun music festival collateral like stickers and T-shirts.

Thank you for reading until the end of this case study!