She Kills Monsters

• Date — December 2019
• Client — SUNY Oswego Theatre Department
• Role — Layout, Illustratons, & Motion graphics
• Software — After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Media Encoder, Photoshop

She Kills Monsters, a play written by Qui Nguyen, debuted in 2011; Its the story of Agnes Evans, a young woman grieving for her deceased sister Tilly. When Agnes stumbles upon Tilly’s Dungeons & Dragons notebook, she finds herself catapulted into a journey of discovery and action-packed adventure in the imaginary world that was her sister’s refuge.

Brief

Create a series of multimedia advertisements. The director wanted to spotlight text and imagery that reflected the iconic Dungeons & Dragons user manuals with Agnes' journey through Tilly's game. A major goal was to include custom illustrations and text treatments. Deliverables needed to address two poster sizes, a post-card mailer, social media ads on Instagram, a 2 column newspaper ad, and digital signage.

Solutions

After researching the origins and evolution of the Dungeons & Dragons game and previous productions of this play, I created a unique portrait focused multimedia ad campaign.

The title treatment for this campaign references classic 70s sword and sorcery books/movies and 4th–6th century medieval illuminated manuscripts in an homagé to the genre. Thankfully, I had already vectorized a lot of medieval manuscripts from a previous fine art project. Body copy is an older version of Futura; The sharpness of the type's capitals contrast the organic forms of the title and remain legible from a distance.

In contrast, the hero imagery of Agnes is more in line with the modern user manual's artwork.

Additionally, I created a series of animated social media ads in 5 color variants that allude to the main villain of Tilly's game world; the monster in She Kills Monsters.