Kunnia

Concept design and art direction

A difficult subject matter becomes captivating Nordic Noir

Client: Turku City Theatre

Project: Kunnia

Year: 2022

Key art and advertising art direction for Kunnia (Honor), an original play about honor, deception and family. The project included concept design, art direction and editing of a short teaser. The campaign ran locally and nationally in Finland in 2022.

Kunnia was a new play written by Finnish playwright Pasi Lampela. In the play, a single father struggles to connect with his teenage daughter when a shocking revelation changes everything. An allegation of sexual assault sets the father on a destructive path to uncover the truth, with fateful consequences.

The heavy subject matter of the intense, thriller-like drama made it a challenge to market, with concerns about backlash for how the bold play deals with the themes of honor-based violence and assault victims.

It was important that the campaign not reveal too much about the story, leaving audiences to make up their own minds.

We centered the campaign around the theme of deception: Someone is lying.

This invited the audience to come find out the truth.

We crafted a riveting campaign that depicted the four main characters along with the copy: Someone's lying. Shifty looking characters look towards and away from each other, shifting gazes indicating dishonesty. The setting of the play, an apartment on top of an auto-repair shop featured in an abstract sense, with characters lit as if caught by the headlights of passing cars. The dark tone served to reflect the tone of the subject matter and helped frame the play as a thriller, leaning heavily into the Nordic Noir trend.

Four characters, four different stories.

As the drama centers around four characters, we decided to feature all four in the campaign. Depicting the four different characters allowed us to display them as suspects whose motives are in question.

This made for an intense ad, where each character moves around, looking to shift the blame. The point was driven home even further through the sound of a pounding heart, racing in time with the cuts.