Ethera Music Festival

Academic Project / Branding, Animation, Augmented Reality
Overview

Ethera is a fictional music festival that brings listeners into a world of cinematic, fantastical sound. Over the course of 4 weeks, this project aimed to create promotional material for the festival through posters, AR, and social media posts.

Duration

November 2022 to December 2022

Roles

Research, Ideation, Design, Animation, Augmented Reality

Tools

Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Aero

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

To create a cohesive promotional campaign for a music festival

This was a student project created over the span of 4 weeks. The goal of the project was to promote a music festival. All promotional material should be consistent and have a cohesive design system.

A stock image of outside the Vancouver Orpheum
Target Audience

Soundtrack listeners

Adults ages 20 and older who enjoy listening to music that relies more on interesting sounds than vocals. They could almost imagine the music belonging to a fantasy movie soundtrack.

The Venue

Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre

The most fitting location for Ethera to be held in would be the Orpheum. Located in Vancouver, the Orpheum is an elegant building with an atmosphere and architectural beauty that is just right for Ethera’s enchanting sound.

The Music Festival

Step into the sound

Ethera is a music festival that brings listeners in a world of cinematic, fantastical sounds. 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. The music festival features three artists: Eurielle, CLANN, and Auri.

A mood board compiling various images of posters and other artwork that have swirls and intricate details
The Idea

The music for Ethera brought to mind elegant, elaborate, and wonderfully strange shapes and imagery which I wanted to somehow capture in the posters and through the other parts of this project.

Sketches and process work for the Ethera music festival poster on both plain paper and digital canvases
The final posters for Ethera. The poster has a crown with an eye, wings, and various other swirly and elegant shapes
A mockup of the light version of Ethera's music festival poster on a transit shelter during daytime
A mockup of the dark version of Ethera's music festival poster on a transit shelter during daytime
Music Festival Posters

From light to night

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.

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
Augmented Reality

An immersive experience

Ethera’s AR experience concepts includes a blinking eye, movement for the wings, 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. There would also be a lot more dimension to the poster when viewed through an AR lense because the layers would be rearranged to give the experience more depth.

Sketches for potential Instagram posts and stories for Ethera's social media campaign
The final social media stories and reels for Ethera showing the artist line-up and AR poster feature in use
The final social media posts for Ethera, explaining the artists and background details about them
Social media campaign

An online presence

Ethera’s social media campaign used elements from the poster to create fun stories, reels, and posts for online promotion. The reels also feature videos of how the AR works for the physical posters.

Three phone screens showing the social media post, reel, and story
Reflection

Future plans?

I had an enjoyable time with this project and a lot of ideas that I wasn’t able to fully flesh out. In the future, some additions I would like to make for this project include: creating and recording the full AR experience I had in mind complete with music, making a stronger social media campaign and fleshing out Ethera’s Instagram profile page, and designing some fun collateral to go along with the whole music festival.

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