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2023
2023
Woods Hole - Cape Cod
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Saturday, July 27 through
Saturday, August 3, 2024
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2019 Merchandise Designs

At the Woods Hole Film Festival we are lucky enough to have wonderful artists from all sorts of backgrounds design wonderful art for our merchandise and festival branding. This year, our three designs were made especially for the Festival by Adam Howard, Stephanie Swanson, and Anastassia Gonye.

Adam Howard is a visual effects artist with a long resume of on-screen credits. He originally trained as a graphic designer, illustrator, and animator with more traditional artistic tools in his birthplace of Melbourne, Australia. He started working at the graphics department at ABC-TV Melbourne, and there he had the opportunity to work with some of the first digital art technology, making him one of the few first digital artists in the world.

Adam eventually moved to the US, where he started working on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and MacGyver (the original series). He eventually went on to win four Primetime Emmy Awards for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. During this time he was doing visual effects work for POP film on projects like Titanic, on which he assisted in creating photo realistic faces of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet for the face replacement scene where the two stars run down a corridor with a wall of water chasing them.

He left POP film to work on Michael Bay’s film Armageddon, which garnered an Academy Award nomination for its VXF work. After that, he was hired for four-week job at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) which turned into a five-year stint working on films such as Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Eragon, and Mission: Impossible III. Since his time at ILM, Adam has been freelancing on films such as The Social Network, The Twilight Saga, The Oscars, and Birdman.

In addition to his visual effects work, Adam is also a portrait artist. He spent some time in Japan as a child, so a lot of his work is influenced by Japanese design. The tentacle design he created for WHFF is inspired by the festival’s tradition of nautical and ocean life imagery, as well as by his work on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

“I loved the imagery created by ILM of the Kraken. Huge powerful tentacles, sea monsters and monsters in general. I have always loved some of the old monster movies. I wanted this image to have an essence of those old films but also be kind of playful and colorful.” – Adam Howard designer of the Kracken Tentacle


Stephanie Swanson is a local artist who manages the Naked Oyster Bistro & Raw Bar in Hyannis, MA. The Festival “discovered” her when her work was displayed The Pickle Jar, a Falmouth restaurant. Stephanie has been interested in design from a young age, and worked with us  to hone in on an image that combines the festival’s spirit and her own personal style.

“It was important to try and embody the soul of the festival in this design… I enjoyed having a vision to fulfill and the processes it took to get to the final design. I really loved doing the research needed to make this idea come alive and working with such a historic organization on Cape Cod.” – Stephanie Swanson designer of the Whale Ship


Anastassia Gonya is a designer for the children’s clothing company Tuff Kookooshka that she founded on Cape Cod. She, has been partnered with WHFF for years, designing the children’s merchandise. She was inspired to go into clothing design by her family. “I come from a long line of fashion and costume makers. My grandmother was a costume designer for the theater. My mother designed the figure skating costumes for Soviet Olympic Athletes. I went to sleep each night listening to the sound of the sewing machine.”

She started off designing clothing for the women of Moscow’s elites, and eventually transitioned to doing children’s clothing in Cape Cod. She credits her transition to children’s clothing as a decision to economize her materials: “I use expensive fabrics, so I decided that I could make more outfits if they were child sized.” Her son was also young at the time, and him and his friends surrounded her with inspiration to move into a younger demographic.

Her “future filmmaker” design for WHFF is inspired by the nautical theme of the festival, particularly squid.

“I love the way squid look, move, and interact with each other. I love to catch them and draw them. They are little missiles of energy. When thinking about a director’s role, I thought that they must wear many hats. Squid have built in hats. So then the design rolls from there.” Anastassia Gonye, designer of the Future Filmmaker Squid

The images created by these designers have been incorporated into Festival merchandise for the 2019 Woods Hole Film Festival. The t-shirts, sweatshirts, posters and hats are available for sale online and at the Festival Box Office at the Old Woods Hole Fire Station, 72 Water Street, Woods Hole.