Dreams & Disillusionment | Integrated Consumer Campaign

Dreams & Disillusionment Film Festival

Promotional Consumer Campaign

Fall 2025

Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects

Awards: AAF Fort Worth Silver ADDY

Dreams & Disillusionment: Dismantling the American Dream is a conceptual film festival that unfolds inside Wall Street’s historic Cipriani Hall, guiding guests from indulgent celebration to sobering reflection. Blending 1920s art deco opulence with modern critique, the event explores America’s obsession with wealth, power, and moral decay through screenings of Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby, There Will Be Blood, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Each evening strips away layers of glamour—champagne replaced by black coffee, jazz fading into silence—mirroring the collapse of the American Dream. The brand identity and promotional materials reinforce this evolution, including a reimagined Citizen Kane poster, custom champagne label, vinyl record, social media grid, and motion reel. Together, they evoke both allure and unease, inviting affluent audiences to confront the emptiness beneath excess. Dreams & Disillusionment transforms a night of luxury into a meditation on ambition, morality, and the fragile veneer of success.

An art display in a museum with a gold ornate frame showcasing a poster about citizen Kane, featuring stacks of books with "Never Enough" written on them, chains, pocket watches, and dollar bills.

Event schedule for a film festival, featuring three nights with different themes and films, and full event details including dates, times, and activities, set against a red curtain background.

Vinyl record and red cover with gold art and text, set against a red velvet curtain background.

A person holding a black wine bottle with a red and gold label that says 'Reverie & Ruin' and features an art deco style design.

Three bottles of bubbly champagne with gold foil tops, displayed against a red curtain backdrop. The bottles have red labels with gold geometric designs and text.

Collage of framed images and quotes on a red curtain background, including photographs of elegant settings, vintage items, and famous personalities, with decorative gold borders.

American Advertising Awards

Seven women standing on a stage, holding awards and certificates, at an event with colorful lighting and background.

Promotional Reel

A stage presenting Sydney Snyder from TCU at the Dreams & Disillusionment Film Festival, with a woman in a red dress standing in front of a large blue screen.

A woman in a red dress standing in front of a large blue screen with white text displaying "Sydney Snyder" and "TCU | Dreams & Disillusionment Promotion." The woman is holding an award or trophy.

Process

Pictured above is the process of creating the poster of the feature film of Dreams & Disillusionment, ‘Citizen Kane.’ Orson Welles’ film is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, largely due to the pioneering of new cinematic techniques that it employed. The poster pays homage to one of the closing shots of the film (pictured), in which Kane has just died alone in his mansion, with no company except the vast ballroom of wealth that he spent his life accumulating. This shot is particularly emotional, since the audience is confronted by the sheer meaninglessness and excess of it all. I stamped the headline ‘Never Enough’ into several wooden crates and filled them with trinkets, treasures, and cash, to physically translate Citizen Kane’s critique of insatiable greed into striking imagery. The resulting poster blends controlled shadows, deliberate prop styling, and sharp design into a visual statement that invites audiences to look beneath the surface of material ‘success.’

Citizen Kane (1941)