We created an iconic campaign for the 2019 edition of the Dublin Fringe Festival titled Superweirdos. The creative was inspired by festival director Ruth McGowan’s Curatorial Callout which featured power as a central theme.
Our creative positioned the artist as hero with creativity as their superpower. While superhero movies are an omnipresent and stultifying force in mainstream culture, we approached the idea with less kitsch interpretation for our treatment. We set the artist as gifted outsiders, differentiated not just by their freakish scale, but by their idiosyncratic perspective on the city. The artists bestride Dublin but their size is not threatening or coercive; they are curious explorers of the city, vulnerable despite their scale.
The campaign needed to be bold and distinctive while keeping the Fringe tradition of foregrounding the festival’s artists and Dublin itself, and needed to work not just in the print brochure but across all media. Central to that would be the photography which would bring our Superweirdos to life.
The photography would be central to the campaign across the festival’s brochure — its most significant piece of marketing — as well as the posters and advertising used in print and digital.
The photography needed to capture the artists and the city, two of the central elements of Dublin Fringe Festival. The three artists represented the breadth of talent at the festival, while the locations needed to be identifiably Dublin, without being cliché.
We commissioned Dublin-based photographer Hazel Coonagh to take the photography which would define the campaign. Hazel was chosen for her immense technical expertise and extremely creative attitude to the production of imagery. We commissioned a stylist to ensure that the hero images were playful and theatrical, a world away from the electrifying vision of urban Dublin which we had conjured for the the previous year’s campaign — much to the client’s delight.
Our production team also shot alongside Hazel to capture locations on film, and filmed the artists against green screen in studio in order to recreate our Superweirdos movements amongst the buildings of Dublin.
The photography was central to all promotional materials, beginning with the festival’s brochure but living on Fringe’s outdoor posters, their website, their social media.
