Athens-Epidaurus Festival

Project Description

The aim of this project was to imagine what it would look like if an international festival came to Duluth. The end goal was to have a poster, a mascot, some merch to be sold, and an element with AR augmentation. For my take on this project, I chose the Athens-Epidaurus Festival.

The Athens-Epidaurus Festival in its current iteration has a history of about 65 years. However, the festival has much deeper roots spanning back to Ancient Greece with the City Dionysia. The City Dionysia was not a city, but rather a weeklong theatre festival held in Athens to honor the greek god of theatre, wine, madness, and ecstasy, Dionysus.

As with every project, we begin with background research. You can view the reseach and finished project gallery at the end of this section.

Festival:Deity Research 1

Festival:Deity Research 2

Festival:Deity Research 3

Festival:Deity Research 4

Logo Creation

The first step in our research process was to gather imagery related to the festival. I went classical, with architecture and baroque paintings and classical-feeling lettering. I may have strayed a little more Roman than Greek for some of it, looking at the research again..

Our second point of research was to come up with a bunch of words that described our festival. We also did a metric to determine the “feel” of our festivals. Mine, I determined, was traditional and formal in feel. But, keep in mind.. we are talking about a festival to the god of parties.

Our third point of research was to find logos that exemplified the feel of the festival as we had defined it, and use them to gain inspiration. 

Next step was to start ideating different logos. These are some routes I explored, leanind on the architecture I saw in the initial research phases, symbols associated with Dionysus, and of course, wine. 

More logo ideas. 

Next, I picked a couple I really liked and digitized them. 

I decided to move forward with the grapes, as a nod to Dionysus’ history with wine, and wine and grapes’ association with finer things like theatre. I paired the grapes with the Jana Thork font.

Final Logo System. I adapted the logo to be scaling, to accomodate the different products that would be designed later in the process. 

Poster (Quarto)

Next point was to create a poster for the festival, but with a catch – this poster had to be able to fold into fourths and still have the most necessary information visible. This information could be on the front or back. Considering the nature of my festival (plays going almost constantly for a week), I knew I’d need most of my back poster for plays, locations, and start times. So, front it would be.

First, I created some concepts with little thought to the quarto aspect. I wanted to not hamper my creativity too quickly, and knew if I really liked a concept I could figure out a solution for the quarto aspect. I created six concepts, three of which could be easily converted to a quarto-favorable design. Like I note in my slides, the some of the discarded concepts got second lives with the merchandise.

Once I picked a direction, it was pretty straightforward. I don’t have any in-progress shots, but the final poster came out perfectly.

This first concept for a poster involved Dionysus holding the grapes of the logo over a stack of wine goblets. The goblets were meant to mimic the theatre facade from earlier research, and wine was to be dripping from the grapes over the goblets/Theatre. 

This concept features flowers with the faces of theatre masks watching a severed head fly above them. Gruesome, but inspired by an actual greek play. In the Bacchae, a Prince disrespects Dionysus and long story short, ends up dismembered. This ended up not as a poster, but as an AR-augmented sticker. 

This concept featured Dionysus partying with theatregoers. Ultimately this concept was scrapped because although it was true to Dionysus, it wasn’t necessarily the best representation of the actual festival. 

This ended up being the concept I went forward with for the poster, because it could be adapted to a folded state the best. It features theatre-goers and Dionysus alike heading towards the theatre. 

This idea was supposed to mimic the imagery of a fresco, with Dionysus partying with a theatre-masked flower and a leopard (a symbol associated with the god). Some of this imagery made its way onto the sticker and other promotional materials. 

This final idea was supposed to represent wine-soaked play script pages dripping and morphing into the actual architecture of the stage in the initial research. It did not end up resurfacing in other materials. 

Merchandise

When creating merchandise for this project, I was thinking about the audience that would be coming. Likely, there would be two groups: Theatre patrons age 55 and above, technology-resistant; and college kids, broke, utilitarian-minded. This guided the choices I made as far as to what to offer.

The DVD might seem like an odd choice on the surface, but for older folk who are technology resistant (and trust me, in Duluth, a lot of them are), a DVD is a known technology they can use. For the college kid, they may want to buy merch, but have a limited budget. A small keychain can bridge that gap. As for a coffee mug or canvas bag, those might be spendier in the eyes of a college student, but they serve a purpose. Especially in Duluth, since they implemented a 5 cent tax on plastic bags.

But there is one more merch item that necessitates its own section.

Sketches of all the merch items, and some that didn’t make the cut.

Double-sided canvas bag featuring the the theatre-masked flowers, Dionysus, and the ill-fated prince.

DVD of select performances. Includes a playbill and DVD, both with illustration derived from the poster. 

A wrap-around mug featuring the theatre mask flowers, Dionysus, and the ill-fated prince.

Old Motel-style keychain with fresco details and a sleeping Dionysus. I couldn’t find a nice mockup, so this is what we’re left with. 

Augmented Reality Sticker

Powered by Artivive.com, we were able to bring a merch object of ours to life using Augmented Reality. I chose to create a sticker, and to give you a scope of other items augmented, others did their poster, a ticket, a button.. all flat items.

The sticker I made used the same illustrative concept as the bag and mug. I broke the illustration down from its illustrator file, imported it to photoshop, and made a gif. Then, using Artivive, the still image used for the sticker and the gif were uploaded. Then, after printing the sticker, we were able to use the Artivive app to view the Augmented Reality version. The best part? If you download the Artivive app (it should still be free?) and scan the still image of the sticker on here, you should be able to view the AR yourself! (Not too many times though… they’ll make me give them money 🙁 )

If you can’t (or don’t want to) download the app, you can view the video of the AR in motion as well.

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