To put it simply, when a close colleague of mine, Martin Bonniċi, had asked me to handle the branding and promotional material for his upcoming short film – I couldn’t resist.

Tele-Monkey is a six minute CG animated short film that will be available to view in 3D. A big first for Martin, and for Malta as well. The story revolves around, yes, a monkey! A monkey named Joe who’s obsessed with tele-marketing and advertising, believing that behind all the jingles and taglines is a secret, hidden message. All in all it’s a satirical take on the whole industry.

I knew right away that the majority of the imagery and look of the film would be dark, maybe even grungy. So I decided immediately that I wanted a logotype that would work easily over such a background and that it would need to be bright to work effectively.

After experimenting with a few different looks, and some discussion with Martin, we eventually gravitated towards a logotype that would work like a neon-sign. To indicate in some manner the kind of culture that the film lives in. For obvious reasons, the logotype was worked in 3D.

After the logotype, I started work on the short film’s poster. With this, I wanted to take the opportunity to do something abstract in the context of the story. Using elements that were indicated in the short film (at this stage, I had only a quick render of Joe and one of his rooms), and creating something a little surreal.

One of the elements from the story that I really liked was the motif of the ballerina snow globe. Somehow I felt that this image, so far removed from the rest of the surrounding atmosphere of the short film, would be interesting to pursue.

Calling on my background skills in advertising. I eventually developed a rough sketch that exhibited the composition and style of the poster, as well as the typeface that would be used for all of the promotional material for Tele-Monkey.

The largest part of Tele-Monkey for me, apart from all the PR elements, design of the poster and dvd box etc would be the website.

To kick-off awareness for the short film, I designed and set-up a teaser website with information on the crew, the synopsis of the short film, and how to donate. Using only the silhouette of Joe as the main image of the one-page teaser, as we didn’t want to give him away just yet.

Next came the full website. With a good idea on what the content would entail, I started developing the site-map and UI design. By this time, I was receiving more and more test renderings and visuals of the short film from the production team. Giving me a clearer picture on how the style was going to look, which made it a lot easier to create a more faithful design.

• Visit the website

Using grungy-looking back panels to organise the information on the page over colourful background imagery (or as colourful as it gets in the film!). Again, working with colour and textures to create a juxtaposition that would make it easy for people to navigate through all the cool info in the site.

Once the home page design was approved, it was a matter of slowly applying that same style to the other pages in the site. Afterwards, came the final stage – filling the site! Developing visual and written content in the form of news updates, wallpapers, crew information, even editing the short film’s trailer.