It’s that time of year again. One of the best things about the winter season coming around after the holidays is getting excited for Reframe Film Festival. I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in the festival from an arms length for many years now, ever since premiering my first documentary there in 2016. Since then, it’s harder to determine which years I didn’t have a film in the festival than the years I did. Needless to say the festival has been a huge part of my life and career up to here, and has helped to encourage and inspire me on my journey as a filmmaker. I have a short documentary premiering at the festival this year, but I’ll talk about that in another post.
This year will be the 4th in a row that I’ve supported the festival by creating a pre-roll bumper for the film programs, as well as a promotional trailer, or ‘hype video.’ It’s always a really fun project for me. I love thinking of the audience getting into their seats, excited for what’s in store on the big screen, and setting the mood with a 10 second graphic introduction.
This year the theme of the artwork (above) was about community, and used a bonfire as a main part of the imagery, to imagine a community gathered around a bonfire. So this naturally led me to think of including fire in the bumper:
And here is the hype trailer for this year. I took a big swing including sound bytes from trailers that had music in the background that I had to work around, but with some mixing magic, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
This year, I thought it would be fun to have a blog post that includes previous years’ bumpers, for anyone who’s curious or interested. This isn’t what I do all the time, but it’s become a bit of a tradition, and a project that gives me a lot of joy.