Outside of the film world, one of my passions is graphic design. I'm naturally a very visual person, and I'm always interested in the way things look and the choices that go into presenting information. As everything does with me, this ties back into film, as I love the world of movie posters. The process of condensing a two-hour film into one A2 sheet of paper and figuring out how to sell your movie to an audience, convince them to part with their time is a really intriguing process.

For all three of the short films I helped make this year, I produced poster art, as I felt it was a nice final touch, and helped put a cap on the end of the projects themselves. They also double as the thumbnail images for the films on sites like Youtube and Vimeo

For both Clean Barry and Narcissus, my very first act in pre-production was to create prospective title cards, as I feel this to be incredibly helpful in setting the right tone and getting into the right kind of creative mindset. If we know what the eventual title card or sequence will look like, we've then got an aesthetic to aim for


Narcissus had some potential alternate titles, and we eventually ended up going with a handdrawn title card instead.

During the COVID pandemic, I set up my own business, designing and selling alternative posters for some of my favourite films. The business has been steadily successful, being with my designs being featured on a handful of fansites and subreddits.

Uncut Gems
Knives Out
Mad Max: Fury Road
Invincible
Parasite
Memories Of Murder
David Byrne's American Utopia
Midsommar

My design style tends to be influenced by posters of the late '60s and early '70s, and I'm drawn to the simple but bold choices of that period, with lots of negative space, big display fonts and often one sole central image.

For Hitsville U.K., the blog I ran, I would constantly be designing the layout of the site, as well as social media posts and merchandise. We posted a regular end-of-year list section, collating all the writers' favourite releases, and I spent a lot of time working on the visual identity of those sections in the months leading up to every "December list season".