Reality Is Flexing On Us
Dublin Fringe Festival
The title and inspiration for our creative treatment for the 2021 edition of Dublin Fringe Festival, Reality Is Flexing On Us, were taken from a line in the curatorial call-out written by Fringe Festival Director, Ruth McGowan. It conjured a Dublin landscape distorted and abstracted by the artist’s touch.
Context
2021 was our fourth year collaborating with Dublin Fringe Festival to devise an overall creative campaign for the promotion of the festival.
Having built up trust with the client over the course of our relationship, our brief was essentially wide open, with just a few essential notes to hit:
1) Foreground the artists
2) Include Dublin, the festival’s venue
3) Do something new
The creative campaign’s materials — photography, videography and design — would define the aesthetic of the festival, build anticipation in the months leading up to it and drive ticket sales for the individual events.
This would encompass the festival’s brochure, out-of-home advertising, posters, a re-skinning of the website, stylised social media content, and a video campaign to bring the creative to life.
The theme of the 2021 curatorial call-out was ‘Superflux’, and Ruth McGowan’s vivid phrase, “Reality Is Flexing On Us”. For bigO, this inspired a visual aesthetic using reflective surfaces and refracted imagery to create a sense of disorientation and distortion of the familiar.
We worked with photographer Hazel Coonagh and videographer Iggy Laugalis to create and capture imagery at a number of locations around Dublin City Centre, using the talents of two performers from Fringe – Isabella Oberländer and Eavan Gaffney – as our stars.
We created and captured wild, experimental, refracted images with two large acrylic perspex mirrors, and combined this with some deft digital editing in post-production to create the desired results.
The campaign was a resounding success, winning praise from the client, the public and industry peers. The launch video registered 77,000 impressions on the day of launch on Twitter alone.
“Working with bigO on our festival campaign for more than three years now, we’ve often felt they’ve done their best work yet, and the next year they always manage to raise the bar with their creative! bigO are wonderful collaborators and effortlessly deliver the energy of our audiences, the talent of our artists and the importance of place through arresting visual campaigns for Dublin Fringe Festival.” — Ruth McGowan,
Dublin Fringe Festival Director
“Reality is flexing on us. Risk taking is required to find a new direction. It’s the perfect moment for new voices and new artists to cut through the noise. Introduce yourself, we want to hear from you. We’re ready to listen.” — Dublin Fringe Festival 2021 curatorial call-out
