Still Ohio
Kaylin Allshouse
Director
Feature Film
2026
How do you give a first-time feature director a festival poster that makes a strange, genre-bending film feel clear in one image? That was the challenge with Still Ohio. The film is part coming-of-age story, part time loop thriller, with a little sci-fi and Midwestern weirdness underneath. The key art needed to make the movie feel intriguing and festival-ready without making it look like straight horror, a road trip comedy, or something too niche to understand at a glance.
THE CHALLENGE
Kaylin Allshouse came to me looking for key art for Still Ohio, her first feature film, about a college student who joins a cross-country carpool and becomes trapped in a time loop where each Ohio gas station stop grows more terrifying. The tricky part was that the film does not sit neatly in one genre. It has coming-of-age emotion, suspense, sci-fi, thriller, and a little Twilight Zone strangeness.
Kaylin also wanted the poster and opening title credits to feel like one connected piece. That meant the title treatment had to do more than sit on the one-sheet. It needed to become part of the film’s identity, something that could tell the audience what kind of movie this was at a glance.
THE APPROACH
My first instinct was the road. Kaylin had already been thinking about the Ohio signs as a major visual idea, and I was excited by the chance to work on a loop film because sci-fi, horror, and thriller are genres I naturally love. So the question became: how do you make the loop feel visual?
I explored a few other lanes to make sure the sign idea was the strongest one. Some versions leaned into the gas station, the ensemble, the car, the headlights, and the fog, but the repeated Ohio signs kept feeling like the cleanest way into the story. They were friendly and familiar at first, almost like a Midwestern postcard, but once they repeated down the road, they stopped feeling welcoming and started feeling like a trap.
The final direction became simpler and stronger by focusing on Ana. Instead of selling the whole cast or over-explaining the plot, the poster uses her as the emotional entry point. She is running, looking back, and caught between the road, the signs, and the darkness behind her. That let the poster sell the mood, the character, and the strangeness all in one image.
The hardest part was getting the perspective right. The signs needed to repeat into the distance in a way that felt natural, not fake or decorative. The title also had to sit on the road like painted asphalt, sharing the same vanishing point as the signs and the highway. When it worked, the whole image started to feel like an invitation to hopelessness: bright, graphic, and strangely welcoming, but with the feeling that there is no real way out.
THE RESULT
Kaylin responded right away. Partway through the process she wrote, “we love the direction of this poster! It is so close to perfect,” and when the finished version came in she said, “This is great!! Thank you Ron!!”
After two small notes, brightening the title and easing the fade on the signs so the repetition still read clearly, the final key art was approved. We also built the title treatment so it could work with the road texture on the poster or as a clean version for merch like jackets and hoodies.
The final campaign supported the film through a growing festival run, including its world premiere at the Maine International Film Festival, where it ranked as a close runner-up for Audience Favorite, a hometown Cinema Columbus screening, Best Narrative Feature at Cindependent Film Festival, and a Buffalo International Film Festival selection.