- Home
- Case studies
- Estrada Poznańska
British Film Festival.
A festival visual identity that shows Britain without the Queen and red phone boxes.
Challenge
How to represent British culture without falling into stereotypes?
We like being first, and we like backing innovators – which is why we were excited to take on the full visual communication for the British Film Festival, the first festival in Poland, and one of only a few in the world, dedicated entirely to the cinema of the United Kingdom.
The team at Kino Muza in Poznań, the festival's organiser, gave us a tough brief: how do you symbolically represent an event dedicated to British culture without falling into banal associations? How do you avoid the stereotypical nods to the Queen, red post boxes or endlessly rainy weather, and instead open a fresh, modern dialogue with the audience – building a visual identity meant to last for years?
Idea
The Prime Meridian and time zones.
The starting point for our discussions was the Prime Meridian, running through Greenwich in London. For centuries, Britain was known as "the empire on which the sun never sets" – its influence and colonial conquests spread across the entire globe. Just as the Prime Meridian marks time zones, each meridian marks off another slice of the world that Britain's culture once touched. That idea is visible in the vertical stripes that dominate the festival's visual identity.
We didn't want a one-off visual trick, but a system that would serve the festival for years to come – both online and out in the city.
Execution
The dedicated website became a hub for the programme and festival news, a calendar of screenings, and the place to buy tickets. We also designed dozens of social media templates the client could manage easily through an intuitive Figma file. Printed BFF ads appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza and Kino magazine, while online formats ran as display campaigns on filmweb.pl, wyborcza.pl and epoznan.pl.
Painting the city of Poznań in BFF's colours turned out to be key to the festival's popularity. Outdoor campaigns appeared on dozens of city lights and advertising columns across the city's key spots, on trams, on the giant screen at the Poznań International Fair, and on Koleje Wielkopolskie trains. Flags flying over Święty Marcin street led straight to Kino Muza, which welcomed audiences with a red carpet, while branded MINIs and a symbolic double-decker bus cruised the streets of Poznań. Thirty-plus-page programme catalogues and flyers made their way into viewers' hands, and hundreds of festival fans proudly wore BFF scarves, hats and socks.
The festival's visual identity also found its way into a dedicated festival spot. Its score was composed by Alex Gruz, a film composer who previously contributed to the soundtracks of films including "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," "Yesterday," "Motherless Brooklyn," "Enola Holmes" and "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." Inspired by the chime of Big Ben, the Greenwich Mean Time pips and a symphony orchestra, we created an original animation that BFF audiences could watch before every festival screening.
Project team
- Project manager
- Karolina Kulig
- Art director
- Kacper Krysiak
- Website
- Sara Wojciechowska, Paweł Czamański
- Graphics
- Marcin Bilicki
- Motion design
- Krzysztof Magnuszewski
- Wojciech Cielas
