As a part of our final year we could produce two independent projects entirely designed and controlled by us throughout the entire creative process. ‘Outline Festival’ was my interpretation of all the skills and experience I learnt from working on a year long placement for ‘Lovebox Festival’ at MAMA Festivals.
Outline Festival’ is a new innovative music and arts festival which merges the use of technology and traditional festival experience to provide thematic escapism to festival goers before entering each stage (each section) at the festival. The overall theme of the festival is to explore modern day escapism and therefore each stage should reflect this visually.
Before entering any stage at the festival, each ticket holder must enter a state of the art hexagon shaped booth. Each wall inside the booth is fitted with floor to ceiling LED screens and 4D lights/sound and touch, which provides the consumer with a brief introduction of each specific stage. The booths act almost like stage gates so you must go through it to access the festival stage. Whilst inside the booth the ticket holder will experience bold and futuristic visuals which introduce each stage to them in detail and explain each art/music theme. This should provide them with hype, excitement and adrenaline before entering the festival stage and create a USP for ‘outline festival’ specifically. This experience is unique as it allows the consumer to fully immerse themselves personally into the different stages to understand various social themes.
The overall theme for the festival is ‘escapism’ as when researching about why consumers go to music festivals it became clear that they want to remove themselves from their everyday mundane lifestyle. Also, key deep-dive and immersive technology trends all explored ideologies of trying to remove yourself from your everyday. This is in fact the definition of escapism. Therefore, it seemed fitting to explore this visually for ‘outline’ festival.
The themed stages are:
Natural World - which is inspired by nature and floral. A sentiment to young people often forgetting about outside spaces and being so introverted with social media and technology that they forget about the real world around them.
Tribal Youth - which is inspired by the way in which young people communicate with one another. With millennials especially travelling around in almost ‘packs’ or ‘tribes’ of people. It’s a comparison between brotherhood and sisterhoods of young people in a positive way. However instead of grouping one another by race, sex, gender, hobbies - why not create a tribe around ‘outline’ festival where all can be free and have fun together.
Psychedelia - which is inspired by the 1960’s and 70’s trippy dance raves. Most festivals are inspired by these visuals and therefore this stage would pay homage to it. It also would be a place to allow for creative expression and ‘craziness’. Consumers should feel fluid and free and bright and bold.
Reflection - which is inspired by speaking to young people and asking them about some of the daily struggles they face. Much of it was down to their own self-esteem and this generations obsession with looking and being ‘perfect’. Reflection is about seeing yourself for who you are. That whatever you wear, whoever you know and whatever you look like shouldn’t shape you - it should be a reflection but not explain you.
