Raw Power '22

North London's Raw Power Festival, presented by Baba Yaga's Hut, is  swiftly coming around again in August 2022 and for the third year running I've been working on all the promotional material. It's a great festival and always has an exciting lineup of music so there's no shortage of aural inspiration for me to draw on.

The design process started late last year (see dev work at bottom) with the aim to have the logotype work well standalone or as a window onto the art. I was keen to have a versatile method of presentation so that the illustration could breathe full-frame when there were less bands announced on the early posters then be stashed inside the logo to make space for the full band lineup later on.

I created the abstract sc-fi pyramidal landscape with 2d and 3d elements originally then fully 3d for the animated promo which came at the end of the process. It was all put together in Photoshop, After Effects and Cinema 4d to the beat of the stonking 'Reducer' by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs and great fun to work on as always. See this and previous Raw Power work on the main site here.

Raw Power Festival 2020

It's fast approaching music festival season and I'm happy to report I was asked again to create all the promotional materials for the upcoming Raw Power 2020 by organiser Baba Yaga's Hut.

Building on last year's sci-fi/psych designs I further developed the logo with textures reminiscent of amp speakers and created ominous rocket structures fashioned from jack plugs. Over a period of around 6 months the festival line up came together requiring early bird, first and final announcement poster designs while I tinkered away on an animated promo in the background. This focuses on the launch sequence of one of the jack towers as it hurtles towards a sonic-hole (if you like) as the festival line up appears across the action. This was all modelled in 3d and composited in After Effects with the mind-crunching soundtrack provided by headliner Chrome Hoof.

The festival in North London is always a blast and a great place to discover new bands, you can get tickets through their facebook page here.

Raw Power Festival 2019

Here's a job I really enjoyed getting my teeth into recently, creating all the promotional material for a North London music event Raw Power Festival 2019. It's a festival I'm a fan and regular attendee of so was excited to tackle the relatively open brief from the promoter Baba Yaga's Hut. I saw it as a welcome opportunity to indulge my creative and musical leanings with the festival being a great showcase for 'the best psych heaviness, space rock, synth crazyness, left field electronica and much more'.

For the logo I looked for chunky typefaces to adapt into suitably psychedelic texture windows. The artwork came about after two flashes of inspiration, one of them retroactively. I modelled the central figure in 3d, initially thinking welding helmets and slinky robots and was reminded afterwards by my wife that it was probably all inspired by Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (1983). Probably. For the landscape I was thinking heavy-duty gig lighting and dry ice fog by way of Flash Gordon (1980) skies and strange floating droids.

Once the look was signed off I designed the posters announcing the partial and full festival line up then went to town animating a promo video in After Effects to the heavy strains of Gnod's Donovan's Daughter. I've included some of the promo stills here and a few of the initial poster designs beneath the finals to show the creative progress. You can also see the work on the site here with related work.