Creative brief

When Arrow Media approached Little Shadow for 911: Did the Killer Call?, the brief was clear: support a tense, psychological crime docuseries with design elements that wouldn’t sensationalise the violence, but rather ground the audience in each conflicting version of the truth.

Built around real 911 calls from murder cases, the Amazon Prime series blurs the line between victim and suspect. The client needed an aesthetic that underscored this ambiguity, sharp, structured, yet unsettling. The design work had to support forensic storytelling without dominating it.

Our approach

Working closely with Arrow’s editorial and directing teams, Little Shadow created a bespoke visual language for the series. This included the main title sequence and timeline graphics.

With a fast turnaround and a tight episode delivery cycle, our London-based team developed a modular toolkit in Adobe After Effects. We matched the series’ investigative tone.

We avoided stylisation that leaned too heavily into horror tropes. Instead, we referenced real-world UI systems used in emergency services, subtly enhancing them to feel unnerving under scrutiny. Our toolkit was built to scale across episodes and variations, ensuring consistency even as timelines and graphics shifted per case.

The results

911: Did the Killer Call? premiered on Amazon Prime in September 2025.