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Creative Direction
Lights, Camera, Africa!!! Film Festival 2019
A festival's whole footprint, from the first poster to the screens behind the stage, carrying one idea: Tales by Moonlight.
What I did. Built the moonlight-inspired campaign system for the 9th edition and ran it across programme design, social, posters, merch, and animated stage screens.
Outcome. One cohesive identity for the three-day 2019 Lagos festival, on every public-facing and on-site surface.
CONTEXT
Lights Camera Africa is an established Lagos film festival built around African storytelling, independent film, and the people who make it. By its ninth edition it had its own standing as a gathering point: three days of screenings across documentary, feature, and short formats, alongside filmmaker learning sessions, networking, and music. The 2019 edition ran 27–29 September at the MUSON Centre's Agip Hall, themed "Tales by Moonlight," a nod to the folklore tradition of stories told after dark.
That theme is the brief in miniature. A festival edition is not a blank identity. It inherits the festival's standing and has to express one year's idea across everything the audience touches, from the poster that pulls them in to the screens behind the stage once they arrive.
PROBLEM
The work was a campaign identity extension, not a logo from scratch, and that is the harder version of the job. The festival already meant something. The task was to take "Tales by Moonlight" and translate it into a flexible visual language disciplined enough to carry the whole edition without thinning out.
A festival lives across an unusually wide surface area, each piece seen in a different context inside a compressed run of dates. A programme flipped through in a seat, a post scrolled past on a phone, merch worn home, animated screens flanking a live stage. Get the system wrong and the edition fractures into unrelated pieces that happen to share a theme. Get it right and a year's idea reads as one thing everywhere it appears.
ROLE
I was engaged through Einsteinette Limited as Creative Director on the Lights Camera Africa account, responsible for the edition's visual direction and for producing the print and digital materials across the festival. The campaign language for "Tales by Moonlight" and its application across every surface, from social to the stage, were mine.
APPROACH
The starting decision was to build the theme into a system rather than decorate individual assets with it. "Tales by Moonlight" pointed somewhere specific, so I built the language to match. Deep black backgrounds, cyan-to-blue-to-purple gradients, and white line illustration drawing on African folklore references. Bold uppercase festival typography carried the energy, balanced against clean programme layouts where information had to stay legible. The result felt nocturnal and culturally rooted without tipping into decoration.
That language then had to scale and stay intact. High-contrast digital and social templates kept the identity consistent across the constant stream of promotional pieces a festival generates in the run-up, so speed never pulled the look apart. The same system ran the film programme, social highlights, consultation announcements, posters, and merchandise, each one an application of the edition language rather than a separate solve.
The highest-stakes surface was the stage. Some of the theatre screen graphics were animated, which meant carrying a system built for flat print and static social into motion without losing it. The stage is the backdrop to the live moment people photograph and share, so the screens had to read instantly and feel like the same festival the audience had been seeing for weeks.
OUTCOME
The final system gave the 2019 festival a cohesive visual language across public-facing and on-site touchpoints, from social promotion and programme design to merchandise and theatre screen graphics. It supported a three-day Lagos film festival, with programme materials, social assets, print collateral, merch, and stage screen graphics all running on one language, and it translated "Tales by Moonlight" into a practical campaign system that could move across print, digital, and the venue experience.
Taking a single theme and making it hold across that many surfaces, at that speed, is the part of festival work most people underestimate. It is the difference between producing materials and directing an edition.
