Grave Happenings | A Coen Brothers Film Festival

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CONCEPT + FILM FESTIVAL THREAD

Grave Happenings is a hypothetical film festival positioned around a select number of films by the Coen Brothers. This was a semester-wide project in which a large unified set of deliverables was created to support a central thread that was identified to reflect the director’s overall artistic style, as well as the common themes spanning across each film. The film festival thread is denoted by the following:

The folly of blind ambition, fueled by desperation, is what inevitably triggers a domino effect of poor decisions that are ultimately doomed to desolate circumstances. Disguised as mere haplessness, such grave misfortunes are in fact a product of our own undoing; we are unaware that we’ve been in fact “digging our own grave” all along.

DESIGN

Aesthetically, careful designs considerations were made to both symbolize and capture the central themes identified in the film festival thread. The central colors “radiation” yellow and “slime” green where used to subtly convey a sense of contamination and corruption. A consistent photographic style, illustrated by a staged hodgepodge of seemingly random items, was used in order to invoke the perplexed notion that, "Whatever may have happened here...wasn't good." The inconsistencies inherent to the visual qualities of a typewriterface were used to reinforce the theme of uncontrolled haplessness and instability. Nonsensically scribbled lines and circles were also scattered throughout as a graphic element were also applied in the same vein.

As an extension, core materials used were scuffed paint, worn wood, and rusted metal to communicate a sense of deterioration and the exposure to the unforgiving nature of circumstance. In keeping with this notion, burnt and wrinkled vellum paper was also consistently applied across each deliverable a printed material. Almost all deliverables were encased in salvaged containers (a pipe, film reel canister, tool box, etc.) as a point to house, or in other words “disguise,” each item within cases that they didn’t necessarily belong in.