This Little Piggy Goes to Market
Katherine Connor Duff
Director
Short Film
2026
How to position a tonally complex indie short for festivals without forcing it into a single genre? The whole film lives in the space between social satire and psychological horror. The poster had to hold both without picking sides. Made for a director going into her festival run. One iconic image that flexes across vertical, horizontal, and promotional formats.
THE CHALLENGE
Katherine came to me looking for key art for This Little Piggy Goes to Market, a short film about an OnlyFans foot model trying to raise money during a livestream before getting evicted from her apartment. The tricky part was that the film could easily be misunderstood as a fetish film or erotic drama, but that is not really what it is about.
The film is a social media satire about online validation, parasocial relationships, voyeurism, and the pressure to sell parts of yourself online. The poster needed to use the provocative hook of the film, but still make it clear that there was something smarter, darker, and more psychological happening underneath.
THE APPROACH
For the poster design, I wanted to keep the visual idea simple and iconic. The main ingredients were the feet, the phone, and the title treatment. The feet had to be front and center because they are the literal focus of the film, but also the metaphor. They represent the part of herself that the character is selling, performing, and using to survive.
The phone became the other key visual because it represents the audience, the platform, and the voyeuristic social media gaze. It is where all the attention, money, comments, and pressure are coming from. Instead of showing every character or over-explaining the plot, the goal was to simplify the whole film into one clear image: glowing feet in front of a glowing screen.
The black background, neon pink glow, and bold title treatment helped push the design into that mix of playful, funny, and unsettling. It has a bit of comedy because the title and concept are absurd, but it also has a horror-inspired, voyeuristic feeling because the character is being watched, judged, and consumed. The film plays with classical and romantic visual elements against modern neon digital culture, so the poster leans into that contrast too. It feels clean and almost elegant, but also strange and uncomfortable.
THE RESULT
Katherine embraced the design right away. She said the poster "wonderfully mixed the playful aspect with the horror aspect" and "nailed the film's theme with one visual shot." After a few small refinements to the legs, background, and title text, the final key art was approved. The poster was then adapted into a horizontal festival layout for Dances With Films, which Katherine approved with "spot on, no notes!" She later called the final poster a "brilliant one-page summing up of the whole 14 minutes" and asked to add the tagline "Show Yourself" for promotional use. The film launches into its first festival run this summer.
