Liliana Apodaca

THE MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

Each year the festival welcomes more than 200 filmmakers, representing more than 50 countries. Screening sections include World Cinema; US Cinema; Valley of the Docs; Children’s FilmFest; a daily shorts program; and Active Cinema, MVFF’s activist films initiative.

MVFF 39 & 40 afforded me the opportunity to design for the film festival’s guests who were invited to interact both socially and materially throughout the festival.

Ballots needed to be designed so visitors could easily cast votes for audience favorite awards…

Design challenges:

•visitors would vote when exiting the theater and hundreds would have to vote at one time in one place.

•the design had to be intuitive as we did not have people stationed capable of giving instructions to many people at once.

Solutions:

•to avoid lines we ditched pens in favor or paper slips which would be torn and cast into ballot boxes. This way many people could vote at once without overcrowding the theater.

•numbers were separated into their own row so that any amount of tear on a number or the stars in its row could be counted as a vote for that rating. Chances of mistakes from inaccurate tearing were limited this way.

It was necessary for us to include both a number and a visual reference as many giests were elderly and the visual clarity lent through this method would help in the somewhat dark theater lobby.

Aside from ballots my duties extended to formatting, making, and cleaning, artwork and logos for merchandising, social, email blasts, and other promotional strategies, used in the time leading up to the festival’s open.

Logos I designed for activist film initiatives at the Mill Valley Film Festival 39. Left: Mind the Gap, a feminist initiative highlighting films directed by women. Right: Vivare a film initiative which highlighted films by Hispanic and Latin American directors.