Mid-Term GOTV

The mid-term has multiple components requiring you to promote and post your Get Out the Vote poster and graphics. Read this project brief completely, making notes about deadlines. All of this work is graded, and amounts to 70 points for your mid-term.

Students will:

• use good documentation techniques, such as in-focus photography, when capturing and recording their work
• keep track of where their work is posted, and how it "lives" there

At the project's conclusion, students will:

• have documented their work on campus, as well as online
• captured a record of where their work was posted and how it has done online, including likes, favorites, and comments on social media 
• learn the value in documenting and keeping track of how their work "lives" and functions outside of the classroom
• have shared their design work with the general public, during the 2016 election season

For Tues. Sept. 27, students will need to print their Get Out the Vote poster and submit it digitally to AIGA.

I. Bring 5 prints of your Get Out the Vote poster to class. These should be printed to tabloid (11 by 17) with a bleed. In order to achieve a bleed, you will need to print to a larger sheet, such as 12 by 18 inches or 13 by 19 inches. You may also print them to the plotter where you can position multiple posters on one sheet, all with a bleed.

• Printing and cutting worth 14 points total
• craft of 5 finished posters, following directions

II. Students will also need to submit their AIGA GOTV poster through the AIGA poster upload portal. Note: you must login through the left-side menu in order to submit. Your poster for upload should be formatted according to AIGA's specifications. When submitting your poster, put Charlotte as your AIGA chapter affiliation since that is the closest location to Winthrop. Once it's uploaded, students will need to take a screen capture showing that they've uploaded their poster or provide other documentation such as a print out of an email confirmation that it's been received.

• AIGA delivery worth 14 points
• documenting your submission, following directions

Items I and II above are worth 28 points together, will count towards your mid-term worth 70 points in total.

For stages III and IV detailed below, students will need to complete their work on or before Sept. 29, end of class:

III. Hang 4 printed posters across campus. Spread yourselves out so we do not have too many posters all in one place. Hang your poster in a place that matters, that adds to your concept, and that relates to your poster design. Take photos of your work hanging up, with a photo capturing a "wide shot" that includes your poster, as well as the surroundings. Your photo should have the following:

• quality lighting
• quality focus, meaning not blurry
• worth 14 points for craft, following directions

IV. Share your GOTV poster designs to your social media accounts, making sure to tag the post with the following:

• #GetOutTheVote
• @aigadesign  
• @aigacharlotte
• worth 14 points for craft, following directions

Instagram would be the best place to do so since that is where this poster project is getting the most traffic and attention. But Twitter works too. Take a screen capture of your poster submission to social media as proof that it's online. Finally, monitor the two accounts above @aigadesign and @aigacharlotte over the coming days to see how it does, if it gets shared elsewhere. Take a screen capture if your work gets reposted, re-tweeted, etc. As of this writing, one student already had theirs picked up and one student has over 628 likes already!

The two items above, III and IV, worth 28 points together, will count towards your mid-term worth 70 points in total.

V. Finally, students are required to track the engagement their poster has in print and on social media. This is due Oct. 11.

• Visit the places your printed posters are hung twice per week. Are they still up? Have they been vandalized? Take photos each time you visit it, and name your photos with the day/time you took them. Your photos should have quality lighting and focus.
• Keep track of the likes, hearts, retweets, and reposts you get in social media: take screen captures each week documenting those numbers.

This final component, item V, is worth 14 points for craft and following directions and will bring the mid-term total to 70 points in all.

Place all visual documentation requested for the above in the Turnstile_2 folder, "Mid-Term GOTV deployment" in a folder titled with your name.

Project 2

Students should continue researching their directors and films to learn about the movies and their visuals, and you should begin to craft a look and feel for the film festival's promotions.

Students will:

• apply their research about their director, genre, and films to create a unified campaign on the assigned materials (see bottom of this post)
• use design skills to create campaign elements that are dynamic, attention-getting, and "on message"
• create design work using strong composition and craft 
• think "outside of the box" where necessary, especially when it comes to the campaign elements they've been assigned to create; remember, you can bend the campaign element in one way or another to further your theme and/or concept

At the project's conclusion, students will:

• have learned about ways to unify a communication program using typography, color, shape, material, and/or rendering techniques
• have learned about designing a communication system, with messages and branding applied to a variety of media

You must have one film festival with at least 8 films. Define your film festival and its theme by our Sept. 22 class. You should use your Exercise 2 research and feedback to provide you with further direction.

Theme can relate to, but is not limited to: genre (such as sci-fi, romance, war, western, gladiators, puppets, musical, or a combination thereof), mood, aesthetic, ethnicity, culture, gender, time, time period, style, form, structure, among others.

Students may have a film festival for a director, such as:

• The Wachowskis: the Matrix trilogy, Matrix 1, 2, and 3, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending, Speed Racer, etc. (theme related to sci-fi, dystopia, man versus machine, man versus alien)

Some directors have made 8 or more films, but some may not have. In these cases you can pivot this project away from one director and towards one theme. A themed festival would look like this:

• Man/Machine: Mad Max, Terminator Salvation, Iron Man, Tetsuo the Iron Man, The Lawnmower Man, Tron, Transcendence, Gamer, Elysium, Repo Men, Automata, etc.
• Note that the examples in this themed festival have movies from different directors, this is a new option for this project, and it is an acceptable option should you choose to shift your idea in this direction.

Whichever route you choose, director or theme, name the festival and brand it for Project 2. When it comes to branding and designing your promotional materials, including the festival's poster, images of the actors, stars, performers should not be relied on. Their faces should not be used as your primary promotional elements You must brand this through typography, imagery, texture, iconography, color, etc. Yes, it is a big challenge.

Final products

• 1 logo/identity to be applied on all of the graphics/promotions (see below), the logo/identity can be a singular identity or it can be flexible/manipulative and change
• Promotion Vehicles - Poster (see below), Public Transportation (such as bus panel, bus wrap, taxi top, subway, may also be a billboard), Postcard (save the date, front and back, will also include the names of all movies), Totebag, Facebook Event Page, Coffee Mug, Banner Graphic for Outside of Venue, Ticket(s)
• All work submitted as digital files, PDF high-quality print
• Poster shall be built at 18-inches wide by 24-inches high, set with a bleed, in CMYK as a press-ready PDF prepared for printing on our color plotter
• Color: the entire color scheme is open, may be full color, one- or two-color, color choice should ideally carry/further the concept.

Project 2: Worth 100 points

• 20 craft, rendering quality
• 30 composition/layout, design appropriateness and uniqueness
• 30 concept, research, clarity of message, use of Exercise 2 research and design thinking
• 20 presentation, professionalism, overall quality of work
• project 2 will have no revisions granted
• final delivery of work yields final grade

Exercise 2 Film Festival Campaign Pitch

Tues. Sept. 20
Students will identify 3 film directors who would be suited for a Film Festival on Winthrop's campus, with 3 of the director's films playing for audiences.

Present the following in a 10-inch wide by 8-inch high PDF, for display in the Rutledge 220 classroom's smart podium. RGB and 72dpi is fine for your images. Be sure to size any typography in your slides large enough for everyone to view, especially those in the back of the room.

1. Choose 3 directors. 
2. Have 3 films for each director to be shown in your film series, with the films being somehow related: genre, aesthetic, theme, message, mood, and/or tone, etc. 
3. You will need to pitch each director and their films, making a case for why people would attend that director's film series, to see all of the movies.  
4. On one slide, show your 1st director and posters of her 3 films (single theme) for your film festival. On slide 2, show your 2nd director and her 3 films (different theme) for the second, and optional film festival. On slide 3, show your 3rd director and her 3 films (a third, and different theme), for the third and final film festival. The posters you show should be of the original movie posters released to promote those movies when they came out. You do not need to design your own posters at this time.
5. Each film series needs its own topical and visual theme that is different from the others you present. 
6. State the theme verbally using action words, adjectives, or other descriptive language.
7. Based on your presentation and pitch, one director's film series shall be chosen and you will design promotion material during Project 2.

Directors and films may be one or more of the following…

• International
• Non-English speaking, subtitled movies
• Silent films, old films
• Contemporary, modern day films
• Future-forward films
• Art films
• any film that has debuted already, as recent as 2016 or as far back as the 20th or 19th century
• in other words, this is very very open

Superhero movies, especially those in the mainstream Marvel and/or DC comics universe(s) such as The Avengers or Superman, aka tentpole movies, are not permitted. Nor are other high-budget, high-return movies that are part of a series or trilogy with the intention of earning huge profits at the box office. Stay away from Harry Potter, Jack Reacher, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.

The films you choose should have a cultural component, and could, in theory, qualify as an art event along the lines of what Winthrop calls Cultural Events.

Examples: 

Akira Kurosawa: Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo (samurai warlords, honor and code, Japan)

Kathryn Ann Bigelow: The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Point Break (war, good versus evil, inner and external conflict, the war on crime the war on terror)

Nora Ephron: You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, This Is My Life (romance, love, identity, family, changes in self, friends, and family)

Pedro Almodóvar: The Skin I Live In,  Volver, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (brotherhood, sisterhood, love, romance, conflict, the power of family)

Sergio Leone: A Fistful of Dollars, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (western theme, cowboys and criminals, the lonely gunman)

Sophia Coppola: The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Somewhere (youth, finding one's identity, finding relationships in the world, relationships with a parent or parent-figure, parenting styles)

Students are not permitted to use any of the aforementioned examples of directors and/or films for their own Exercise 2 pitch.

Exercise 2: Worth 30 points

Assessment, maximum points:

• 3 - identifying three directors for your festival
• 9 - identifying 3 films for each director
• 6 - identifying a topical and visual theme for each series
• 5 - craft/composition of slide layout
• 3 - following directions and professionalism
• 2 - strength of pitch, argument made
• 2 - spelling, grammar

Project 1

AIGA Get Out the Vote (GOTV)
Poster Design


Design a poster that meets the AIGA GOTV design guidelines. Your poster will be unique, appropriate for a college-age audience (18-24 years of age) and not be affiliated with one party. It will be party-neutral.

Students will:

• apply their research about voting, voter registration, and their audience, to create a poster encouraging people to vote
• use design skills to create a poster that is dynamic, attention-getting, and "on message"
• create the poster using strong composition and craft

At the project's conclusion, students will:

• have learned about voting, voter registration, and voting statistics 
• learn about ways to create a design that is "party neutral" with regard to parties in our electoral system
• learn how to create a singular message for viewers to grasp on a poster, when viewed from afar and/or up close

For complete background read the prior posts that include all of the AIGA GOTV information, as well as the Gov. background and the GOTV templates downloaded to our Turnstile_2 folder.

Students shall deliver all of the following at Project 1's conclusion, Thurs. Sept. 15.

I. Digital Submission Formats:

• InDesign file, with all linked graphics and fonts, packaged into one folder with your name
• PDF, as specified in the AIGA GOTV guidelines which will be used for uploading the file to their exhibition

II. Print Submission Formats:

• tabloid (11-inch wide by 17-inch high) printed poster
• one printed poster is needed for the Sept. 13 deadline and critique
• multiple posters shall be printed for posting your design around campus

III. Also submit your Exercise 1 PDF presentation.

See the class calendar for critique days and deadlines.

Project 1: worth 100 points

• 20 craft, rendering quality
• 40 composition/layout, design appropriateness and uniqueness
• 20 concept, research, clarity of message, use of Exercise 1 research and design thinking
• 20 presentation, professionalism, overall quality of work