Niall O'Kelly

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Empire Design is a London-based studio specialising in marketing campaigns for movies. They had set up a New York office a few months before I joined them as their first outside designer. I worked with them for 2 months in early 2007, in my first job after I moved to New York. Whilst there I worked on several movie campaign posters and collateral pieces. These are a selection of them.

Straightheads: This film features Gillian Anderson and Danny Dyer is her darkest work to date. It is a film about dark goings-on in a local forest, after Gillian’s character survives a gang rape and mugging, the pair plot to murder their attackers, but find themselves conflicted about carrying out their plans. I designed a logotype and treatment style for this poster. The logotype gets progressively more distressed through the lettering, alluding to the characters break-down, The protagonists faces are obscured by the forest, suggesting the darkness in the film, both in terms of what happens to them and what they themselves plot in revenge.

The Hitcher: This is a film about a psychopathic hitchhiker who stalks his prey through the New Mexico desert and keeps coming close to them no matter how often they think they've managed to elude him. These poster designs were done for the International campaign. The U.S. campaign had been quite in your face and featured a close-up of the hitcher and his knife. A more subtle treatment was desired for other markets. My comps ranged from the gorey to the more typographic and thought-provoking. The client chose the red toned version in the end.

Knocked-Up: This is a film which should need no introduction. The U.S. campaign had been much more literal, showing the two lead actors sitting in a doctors waiting room. For the international campaign, the posters went in a very different direction, showing hundreds of sperm swimming to the ‘O’ in the logotype. I worked on the production for many of the foreign language campaigns, some of which are shown here. Some liberties had to be taken with the design concept, as not every language had an ‘O’ for the sperm to swim toward (though the ones here did). This series shows though how a clever idea (not mine unfortunately, as it was created before I joined) can easily be translated across different languages and formats and still work extremely well.

Skills

IT Adobe Creative Suite Microsoft (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)	Crafts/Manual Typography Color Theory Print Production Photography (Photo-Direction) Psychology and Strategy Photography Coding / Site Development
Languages English German Irish	Other Sustainable design Brand Development Project Management Strategy Copy-Writing and Editing