2019 Film Independent
Spirit Awards

For the fifth year running, team Emily Oberman at Pentagram designed the show packaging for the Film Independent Spirit Awards, the annual ceremony that recognizes the best in independent film. The nominees and winners in 2019 were more diverse than ever, with women dominating the Best Director category, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” taking Best Feature and Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” honored with Best First Feature. The current political climate has energized the film industry to be more inclusive and equitable, and this exciting sense of change could be felt at the ceremony. This bold spirit found its way into the design of the graphics, which hint at the heroic with dimensional type zooming through space. 
We created more than 20 bumpers for the ceremony, including introductions and nominee packages. In each animation, dimensional letterforms made of light project through the dark like images in a theater, moving in different ways as the typography is extruded, outlined, and plays with perspective. We experimented with light: having it flicker, swing, dim and blast. In a nod to 3D, the palette is red and blue, the colors that are used to create the stereoscopic 3D effect in film. We worked to make the light letterforms look strong but weightless, playing with the texture to make them luminous and reflective. Light is scattered and refracted within the surface of the letterforms to give them a viscous quality that feels like its own substance and material.










The set design extended the 3D look with a series of screens filled with ambient animations during the ceremony.
The screens created virtual spaces that played with depth and perspective, transforming throughout the show by appearing to
dimensionally expand and recede into space.















Client: Film Independent
Partner and Creative Director: Emily Oberman, Pentagram Design
Design: Todd Goldstein, Shira Inbar, Laura Berglund, Joey Petrillo
Animation: Justin Lawes, Shira Inbar, Todd Goldstein
Producers: Rick Austin, Anna Meixler











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