The direction comes before
the design.
The direction comes before
the design.
Most studios start with the poster. We start earlier with the story, the pitch, and the question of how a project should be seen before anyone else has decided for you.
By the time a project reaches its official key art, the visual decisions that matter most have often already been made by someone else — a platform, a distributor, a buyer. If you want influence over how your project looks, that influence has to start earlier: at the pitch deck, at the sales dossier, at the first conversation about tone and positioning.
That's the work we do before the cartel exists.
What
this
includes
Visual concept development from script or treatment stage
Sales dossiers and pitch decks built to persuade, not just illustrate
Mood, tone and reference direction for a project's entire visual identity
Positioning guidance for pitching to platforms, distributors and co-producers
Case
study
block
The Lobby— Nuda Propiedad
The approach
Following several rounds of conversation with the client, we developed and sketched multiple visual concepts before a single photograph was taken, giving the photographer a clear direction to shoot toward, rather than discovering the concept on set.
Official
&
drafts
The execution
Those sketches guided posing, lighting and composition during the shoot. Talent and locations were photographed separately and composited in post, giving full control over the final image rather than being limited by what a single shoot day could deliver. Why it matters: The concept was locked before production started — reducing risk on set and giving the client a campaign built on a decided direction, not one improvised in the studio.
Dadá Films— Waldo
The Challenge
Waldo is a documentary built almost entirely from archive material — there was no photo shoot, no controlled set, no new imagery to direct. The temptation with archive-based projects is to treat the poster as an editing exercise: pick a frame, add a title. The direction: We treated it as a research project first.
Official
&
drafts
Understanding who Waldo was — his history, his era, his presence — came before any image selection. From that research, we composed the poster from period frames and archive photographs, unified in black and white, with the title set in pink to cut through the muted palette and carry the piece. Why it matters: A documentary without a shoot doesn't mean a poster without direction. The absence of a studio, a set or a photographer didn't lower the bar — it just moved the work earlier, into research and curation instead of production. That's still creative direction, not execution.