Directors

Mehmet Kizilay

Mehmet Kizilay is the founder of Kraken Istanbul. Born in Tekirdag, Turkey, in 1981. Studied Digital Media Production at Oxford Brookes University. He’s been directing and designing film and television title sequences, television commercials and TV channel id packages since 2007.  He began his career at Trafo as Head of Motion Graphics Department. In 2008, then became creative director and partner at Dirty Cheap Creative in Istanbul.
In 2014, he founded Kraken Istanbul, where he leads a team of artists designing film and television main title sequences, commercials and branding identity packages. Kizilay received numerous international and local design honours, including a Gold Prize from the Bass Awards  and an Emmy nomination with titles he designed for HBO’s Silicon Valley in the Outstanding Title Design category. Kizilay is also an academician at Istanbul Bahcesehir University teaching Motion Graphics to young ones. He also holds jury duties at local award ceremonies like Crystal Apple and he has consultancy roles at the executive committee under the Motion & Title Design peer group in Istanbul.

Mert Kizilay

Mert Kizilay is a Los Angeles based designer/director/artist. Born and raised in Turkey.
He studied fine arts, drawing, painting, mixed media. He has always been attracted to sound and music as well, and he used to collect sounds, create compositions for his own.
His first step into filmmaking was studying on cel animation. His interest in other mediums expanded quickly; experimenting with different materials, different animation techniques, digital art, live action, stop-motion, composing.
He made several awarded short films, involved in art shows.
After 3 years of experience in motion design industry, he moved to Los Angeles and joined to yU+co as a generalist and he eventually became Creative Director. His focus got even more into storytelling and conceptual thinking, and responsibilities got expanded to writing, pitching and leading various projects. He worked on several titles for film and tv.
Now he is still located in Los Angeles, working as an independent director/artist.