PATRICK O'KEEFE

illustrator & concept artist

Patrick O'Keefe is a production designer at Sony Pictures Animation. He worked as a visual development artist and matte painter on a variety of films, video games, commercials and television shows. After his spectacular work as one of the art-directors for the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, he ended up leading the art department team for the sequel: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, taking part in the production of one of the most visually exciting feature animation of 2023!

Toronto born but LA based Patrick O’Keefe’s career has been a collision of timelines from across the art-verse, starting with graffiti, then studying animation at Sheridan College, painting at Emily Carr, followed by working in gaming. More recently he worked in the teams managing art direction and visual development on big Hollywood productions such as Spider-Man: Into/Across the Spider-Verse and Hotel Transylvania 3. Patrick has also worked as a concept artist for EA’s Battlefield Hardline and Dead Space 2 & 3 video games as well as collaborating with Visceral Games, Mercedes, Blind Pictures among others.

O’Keefe has worked on award-winning virtual reality short films such as Henry, which won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Interactive Program in 2016, and Invasion!, which took home a Daytime Emmy in 2017.

 

Talking about his projects’ approach Patrick said: “When it comes to my work and paintings, I will always try to capture moments of beauty because the world is a beautiful place. I try to blend realism and horror as I can to make relatable situations that you’re just happen to stumble upon. That element will make the viewer believe they’re in a real place. When you add the horror element to the believable environment they complement each other. If it feels like a real place then your fear should in turn, also feel real.”

He also confessed: “Often I will take time to work on a variety of other projects, it is always fun to switch it up for a while and spread my wings. Lately I have been doing design work for a variety of animated commercials including clients such as McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, Rice Crispy’s and Kraft. Additionally I have been lending a hand in the development of some virtual reality animated shorts for Oculus and a few other unannounced studios, those are a blast because at each meeting I get a chance to try out the latest in VR tech”.

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