Empire Design

www.empiredesign.com/

Empire Design is a film, documentary and television advertising agency that specialise in trailers, posters, motion graphics, music and radio advertisements. They are most famous for their unbelievably clean poster design for numerous feature films. Casino Royale, Spectre, Kingsman and Breaking Bad are but a few productions to their name. In most cases, they are the go to company if a film or television series needs effortless design associated with them. There is something about their work that, in my opinion, just screams "Empire Design did this".

The company is owned by Steven Burge and was formed in 1994. Their first piece of work was for the feature "12 Monkeys". Since then they have now two offices. One in Oxford Circus, and one in Downtown Manhattan, NYC.

In order to get any sort of work experience here that was not just a running job, I was incredibly fortunate to know the owners wife, Lisa Burge, very well. Normally she would have just given me a running job for a week, but because she taught me and she knows what I am passionate about, she persuaded the Motion Graphics department to take me on board for a total of 9 days. I am aware that this is more or less 100% luck, but isn't that how this industry runs anyway. 

My Roles

Before I go any further here, it is very important to define why my responsibilities here were actually important. Empire Design is a company worth millions upon millions. They hire the most talented people they can to ensure that the money being paid to them, and then to their employees, is not wasted on bad talent. When someone like me, a complete novice in the industry and not amazingly good at much, is given a task that has money on the line, suddenly it becomes exceptionally important that I don't catastrophically ruin it. For everything I was doing at Empire, this was a constant pressure over my head, yet it is something millions of people in this money hungry industry have to deal with numerous times a day, even every hour.

While at Empire, I had a chance to work on three trailers. A Monster Calls, Assasins Creed and Kingsman 2. This was the first time in my life I was working for a real production and not for something that had either been already made or was just a short film. For all my jobs, I used Cinema 4D and After Effects to create the assets.

Assasin's Creed

Adam, the head of Motion Graphics at Empire, first gave me the job to look at previous work they had done for the upcoming Assasin's Creed trailer and try my hand at redesigning the title cards. From the get go this was quite a big responsibility. Seeing as this was the first job, I used it as an oppourtunity to show my group leader what I could do for them. It was interesting to see that at this company, some of the graphics they make are rather simple. This is so if something needs to be changed quickly, it can be. I tried to stick to this idea when designing my background plates for the titles.

A Monster Calls

The next job I was given during my time at Empire was to look at the already made trailer for the film, A Monster Calls, and try my hand at redesigning the titles in it. I was told that Empire was creating all of the posters for the film and there was a chance that the director may want them to create the trailer too. It was my chance to try and impress the MGFX department with my original work, though that I did not end up doing sadly.

Kingsman 2
This was the most minor role I had at Empire design, but it was what taught me the most. For both Assasin's Creed and A Monster Calls, what I was creating and the methods I used were ones I already knew. However, when I worked with the Kingsman 2 trailer, I had to follow a different method. My job for this trailer was to simply change the given text on already made titles (made by Adam the previous day) to new text given to me by the type-setters in the next room. I then had to queue these to render and then make some smaller assets for the trailer. What I learned from this was nothing creative, but what a company needs to ensure every single employee follows exactly the same filing rule. Since everything runs on a server, every single file (whether it be a single image or a long and detailed render) needs to follow the same naming scheme. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to share theirs, however I can say that I was told twice that I had named my renders wrong for this. I always get very nervous when this happens as I feel like I have ruined something again, but after some more tries I was able to send them off to the editor with no problems.

Unfortunately, the trailer for Kingsman 2 has yet to be released so I will be unable to show my work.

What I Learned
 Empire Design was certainly the most eye opening work experience oppourtunity I had over the summer as it was the most professional environment I was in. One of the key pieces of information I learned about is how the business runs logistically from the inside. The way that every file made needs to be named so that all the employees can easily find them was surprisingly important but of course makes a lot of sense once one is working there. There were multiple cases where I would be asked to find a specific asset to work off and due to their filing system, it was incredibly easy. I would expect most every company to have a similar system, so learning it here was brilliant.

When it came to software, I did not learn much. In fact in some cases I felt as if I knew slightly more than the current employees. As terrible as it sounds, some of the work they had produced for their films left much to be desired, however it is important to know that this could simply be the choice of the director.

I also learned that if you show you care and you show that you are somewhat talented, jobs are not hard to find. At the end of this work experience, Adam offered me a full time job for when I finish university. I have had work experience almost five times now, so it shows that if you dedicate yourself to something, you might be able to succeed. It is unfortunate though because now I feel like I am tied down to one profession. You could say I have also learned that the punishment for learning something is having to do it for the rest of your life.