Southsea Cinema & Arts Centre
2025
Summary
Since joining Southsea Community Cinema & Arts Centre’s marketing team, I have helped with numerous tasks and projects, including attending weekly marketing meetings, updating their Facebook events, and designing posters/posts for their film screenings. Every week, Southsea Cinema’s marketing team meets for 1-2 hours to discuss new ideas, tasks that need doing, and progress on existing tasks. During these, I would find out what screenings or events needed posters/posts made most urgently and gather details about these events so I could best work on these remotely. Outside of these meetings, I would ensure Southsea Cinema’s Facebook events were up to date and create posters and posts for the screenings discussed in the meetings. Most of the designs I created were done using Canva, because although this isn't my preferred platform, it appeared to be the most used platform by Southsea Cinema’s other volunteers. There are a few exceptions to this, with occasional elements being made using Adobe’s Creative Suite where Canva didn’t have sufficient features. Overall, I spent 26 hours working on projects for Southsea Community Cinema & Arts Centre, projects being outlined below.
Quote
"Ekko has been one of our most dedicated and creative marketing volunteers at Southsea Cinema & Arts Centre. Her eye-catching poster designs and engaging social media coverage have been a huge asset to our team. Her creative poster designs have added a vibrant and professional touch to our events. Her passion, reliability, and eye for detail make her an invaluable part of our team. Thank you, Ekko, for helping us grow and shine! “ - Aysegul Epengin (Director, Portsmouth Film Society)
Projects
Facebook Events
At my first marketing meeting at Southsea Cinema, I was asked to upkeep their Facebook page’s events, as they should have 1 event per cinema screening but had been severely behind for a long time. Since then, I’ve added 60+ events to their Facebook page, to keep up with their schedule. Initially, I added many at once to make up for the lack of events for the upcoming month. Then, each time Southsea Cinema’s screenings were released for the following month, I added up to 10 per day until all the events were added. These were split across multiple days as Facebook events can’t be scheduled, so adding many at once does begin to spam your Facebook page’s feed.
To make Faceboook events, I first checked Southsea Cinema’s calender of screenings and events to see what needed adding to their Facebook. I then took the event/film descriptions and cover images from their ticket page to add to the Facebook events. After that, it’s just a case of adding the screening times, ticket links, marketing tags, and collaborators to each event before posting. For high-priority events/screenings that needed pushing more, I then shared these events to various relevant Facebook groups. Other marketing volunteers were in charge of regular Facebook posts for screenings.
Dodge The Dodo Poster
Dodge The Dodo is a band that occasionally plays at events at Southsea Cinema. Initially, they designed their own poster for these events. However, due to undesirable visual design choices, I was asked to redesign this to include the same information but with a better appearance.
I first tried to find the exact Alice in Wonderland image they used for their poster to respect their choice of image, but I couldn’t find any version of the image that was royalty-free, which I don’t think the band considered when creating their poster. Instead, I researched the band and looked into other images related to their choice, when I found a royalty-free image of Alice with a dodo. I used Adobe Photoshop to remove the white background of this image before importing it into Canva.
Once I imported this image into Canva, I added an aged bookpage background and adjusted the Alice in Wonderland image’s colouration to blend well with this. I used a watercolour graphic to add a pop of colour to the image in Alice’s clothing and added a filter to this to make the colours match the poster’s colour palette.
2 different fonts were used, a more decorative font for the larger display text and a simpler font for the smaller font, containing the more minute details of the event.
I used Canva’s in-app QR code maker to link to Southsea Cinema’s tickets, and added Southsea Cinema’s logo in the opposite corner.
Finally, I reduced the opacity of clock graphics and positioned them to the sides of the poster to balance out the lack of detail on the left and right compared to the top and bottom.
The Sub_Bar Show Animated Poster
The Sub_Bar Show is a music experience designed to be enjoyed through sound and vibrations, hosted at Southsea Cinema in April. They designed the original poster, which didn’t have any major problems, but Southsea Cinema wanted an animated version of this poster, which I volunteered to create. Due to limitations with Canva, I made this within Adobe After Effects, using its timeline to animate various values on elements.
To create an animated version of this poster, I first had to recreate the static version with its individual elements on different layers. I found the background image they used on their website, edited it in Photoshop to remove some overlayed text, added both Sub-Bar and Southsea Cinema’s logos, and found a font that matched the poster’s text. I had to rearrange the poster slightly because the dimensions of videos on social media are different from images, requiring the overall design to be slimmer. But once this was all done, I was able to start animating the various elements.
An animated crop effect was used on the text at the bottom of the poster, with an animated rectangle moving with the crop’s end point to add to this effect. The animated rectangles then had their opacity animated to have a fading effect.
The 2 logos appear to switch by animating their transform values, essentially squishing the first logo horizontally until it completely vanishes, then increasing the width of the 2nd logo until it appears in full. The remaining elements were all animated to appear after this logo swap, animated either by their positions or opacities.
A few weeks after sending this animated poster to Southsea Cinema, they sent me a 1-2 minute smaple of Sub_Bar’s music and asked me to add it to the exsiting video. However I felt that this wouldn’t effectively represent Sub_Bar, as their music is deigned to be enjoyable for both people who can and can’t hear. So Instead I sent both the video that Southsea Cinema requested, and a version with an audio visualiser.
Before creating the audio visualiser itself, I first created a simplifed version of Sub_bar’s poster to make room for the audio visualiser without cluttering the visuals. Then I added the sample audio and a blank shape layer with an Audio Spectrum effect linked to the sample audio. After many adjustments and additional effects, I ended up with a circular glowing audio visualiser that reacted to the music. This was then duplicated 2 times before I adjusted the settings of each individual layer to create a more impressive and stimulating visual effect.
The final effect is made up of 3 Audio Spectrums, each spectrum arranged in a circle with different sections reacting to different ranges of frequencies. 1 Audio Spectrum is made of white glowing bars displaying outwards only, 1 made of smaller white glowing dots reacting both outwards and into the circle, and a background spectrum appearing as rays from the bar spectrum.
Finally, I animated a blur effect on the background image to help the spectrum stand out from the background soon into the video.
Shorts::Cut Poster
During a marketting meeting I was asked to design the poster for this years Shorts::Cut film festival for Portsmouth Film Society, which is help at Southsea Cinema. The only inspriation I had for this poster was the 2024 poster for this, which has numerous viusal design issues, however this gave me a starting point for what information to include. After asking for clarification on this year’s dates, I recieved a timeline of 5 dates reguarding nominations for this festival as well as the final event, all of which I was asked to include on the poster.
The main design challenge for this was how to include the full timeline of dates while keeping a consistent style throughout the poster and ensuring everything was visually appealing. Initally I planned to create a normal timeline grpaphic, but after much experimentation I decided on using the panels of a film reel instead. A camera was the only other design element used in related Shorts:Cut publicity materials in previous years, so I chose to add a camera graphic to this poster from Canva’s graphic library. Then to match the film camera theme of this poster I added a film grain effect background. After adding all essential information, I experimented with different fonts and settled on 2 fonts types with a few variations in them. Finally I added a relevent QR code and the logos of both Portsmouth Film Society and Southsea Cinema.
Soon after sending this poster off, it was added to Portsmouth Film Society’s website and socials.
Southsea Cinema Birthday Posters
Each year Southsea Cinema holds a 3 day celebration for its birthday, this year being its 3rd birthday. These events involve film screenings, bands schedules, cooked food, and music over the 3 days. I was asked to design the poster for this event, which I intially struggled with due to the lack of previous work to use as a baseline. No other years appeared to have posters designed for them, and I wasn’t given specific information to include other than the dates.
After testing out various background and design choices in Canva, I decided on a blue blured light effect for the background. This was to give an impression of a party environment without being too crowded with objects or colours. Additonally, the blue matches Southsea Cinema’s logo. I added brightly coloured party themed graphics of a microphone and balloons with a black drop shdow to make them stand out from the bright background. Then to have a central element that isn’t just text, I found a graphic of a hand holding up the number 3, adding more visual interest than 3 being in text. Finally, I expeirmented with a few different fonts and added Southsea Cinema’s logo and website QR code before sending it to Aysegul (Director, Portsmouth Film Society).
Aysegul had no issues with this poster but requested that a banner also be designed that could be added to all posters of events occuring during the 3 days of birthday celebrations. I tried designing more tradiaitonal banner deasigns, with horizonal strips across the page and literal unrolled banners, but many of these only looked good on specific posters so wouldn’t work for everything. In the end I chose to use a 2 layer rectanglular graphic recoloured to match the birthday poster’s background for the base of the “banner“. The essential information was added to make it clear that the event is part of Southsea Cinema’s birthday celebrations, which I wrote in the fonts used in the birthday poster itself. Then to further mirror the banner to the birthday poster, I copied over the microphone and balloon graphics resized to fit the banner.
