Into The New 2021

Into The New is a festival of cutting-edge performance conceived, created, written and devised by the students from the RCS. These students have devoted the past 4 years to exploring their own artistic practice and how it can best contribute towards positive social and environmental change in our world.The Festival is in its’ 6th year and when we were briefed on the project we knew that this year was going to be very different. The brief from the client took this into consideration and we were asked to create a solution that was reflective of the environment that the festival would be held in.Our view on this ‘restriction’ was that it should be viewed as a positive and not a negative, we felt that with unique and individual outdoor posters and an effective creative approach online, the festival could attract a larger and more engaged audience.When talking with the client the idea of 'shapeshifting', and how the festival and performers are adapting to new situations was the key component of the brief. We also talked about how they are not adapting as a contingency plan but with a confidence, boldness and a dogged determindness. The festival is committed to performing live in venues, and the brief mentioned how this so was important to them, so for the very first time, the performance have been pre-recorded and will be broadcast online. This commitment from the festival to these principles and also to its’ existing audience allowed us the opportunity to explore a different medium than they traditionally use. We chose not to spend the budget on traditional print outdoor but move to digital outdoor to allow us a greater sense of variety and scale.The concept that we developed was based around a core visual style for the whole festival, as is normally done, but then creating individual posters and identities for each performer and their piece. This approach allowed us to really focus on promoting the students and the festival simultaneously. Not only did it provide the client with a variety of assets to use on digital sites, it also provided a huge bank of assets to use online.Our brief highlighted key words like shapeshifting, daring, confident, alive, tangible, physical, and 3D. We have woven these key words into the thinking behind the posters and provided a solution that went beyond the clients’ expectations.