Advertising Copywriting / Design >
2011 Citizen Jane Film Scholarship
Having worked closely with the festival directors for a few years, they entrusted me to craft the messaging and design. I used statistics from the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film to bolster the signifigance of the festival and its affiliation with the Citizen Jane Film Scholarship. The trick was making statistical data interesting and attractive to the viewer.
The blue from the festival's logo is the only color, reinforcing the brand and providing focus when surrounded by other ads, festival information, etc. I chose a copy-heavy approach to capitalize on the captive audience the festival environment naturally presents (there's a lot of downtime between the time a patron takes their seat and when the film actually starts). I designed the layout, created original illustrations and wrote the copy for all three ads. I chose the umbrella as a metaphor to symbolize the safe and supportive environment female filmmakers find at Stephens.
These ads ran in the program / guide for the 2011 True/False Film Festival which takes place each spring in the same city as Citizen Jane (Columbia, MO).
"Raining" umbrella ad copy (same for both):
A closer look at women (or lack thereof) in the film industry: Despite making up 52% of all moviegoers (that's right—women represent the majority of buying power...Cha-ching!), women remain vastly underrepresented in the film industry. As of 2009, women directed 7% of the top 250 grossing films (down from 9% in 2008). Women accounted for 8% of writers on the top 250 films, but (are you ready for this?) a whopping 86% of those didn't have any female writers at all. 18% of all editors were women. Women comprised just 23% of all producers, and 17% of all executive producers were women. Of the films that were made, only 2 of the top 10 and only 9 of the top 50 grossing films focus on women (and even then, women aren't always portrayed in a positive way). On the technical side, it only gets worse: behind the scenes of the top 250 grossing films, only 2% of all cinematographers were women. Women typically account for 5% of sound designers, 5% of supervising sound editors, 1% of key grips and1% of gaffers. Although women account for 25% of production managers, a staggering 85%of films didn't have female production managers at all. Want to read about films made by women? It might be tough, considering women comprise only 23% of film critics at the top 100 U.S. daily newspapers. Surprised? Maybe not. Saddened? We are too. It's time for all of this to change. Citizen Jane is ready. Are you?