A school for aspiring filmmakers to apprentice for some of the industry’s top producers and directors, The Film Connection of downtown Los Angeles engaged us in 2014 to reimagine their brand and overhaul their website. As seen in the numbers below, they enjoyed exceptional growth in 2015 from our efforts:
The Film Connection wanted a new, more modern logo to enable the school to be perceived in a different light by interested students.
After extensive sketching and concepting, we arrived at a direction, creating a mark using the F and a backward C to form the part of movie projector where the film threads and loops through the feed sprocket. We then selected a geometric, sans serif font and customized it by moving the Ns together to visually emphasize connection.
Garnering nearly all of their leads from their online presence, the school redoes their website every two years. For the redesign of the site to launch in 2016, we led the executive staff of the school through a dynamic, interactive and thorough discovery session to learn what their perspective students were looking for when choosing their education and how the Film Connection could meet their needs. The resulting roadmap told us where to take the brand moving forward.
After an extensive brand attributes sessions, we discovered the six essential elements that came together to form the school’s mission statement to guide the website design process.
The discovery session provided us with deep insights. We created customer personas that revealed archetypes of their representative perspective students to learn about their goals and needs. We guided their business development team through an objection matrix to discover what objections their staff received in the sales process, and how we could embrace and pivot on those challenges—while addressing those in new website design.
We figured out what messages would resonate most effectively with perspective students and then turned to the UX wireframe for the new home page. We prioritized the messaging, organized them and broke them into blocks, such as the trust block which clustered reviews, affiliations and certifications in one section for maximum impact and clarity.
The next step after the discover session was creating a design stylescape with the look and feel for the site including color palette and typography selections, as well as photography direction and effects.
We recommended a talented photographer, selected the models based on the results from the customer personas discovered in the strategy session and provided direction at the shoot, both in the studio and on location.
With the discovery and strategy session results top of mind, we turned to designing the key pages of the site.
The energetic color palette along with fusing the models with photos of big cities gave the page designs a fresh, distinctive look. The imagery turns the students into stars of the show, able to fulfill their dreams of making movies and beginning a career in film.
Modern web browsers allow for dynamic, engaging movements. We turned over the page designs to the Film Connections development team with instructions for compelling moving graphics and animations throughout the site to make the site come alive.
–Mike Keesling, The Film Connection
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