Ed Ruscha at The Hayward

Last week I visited the Hayward Gallery to see Ed Ruscha's 50-year retrospective, and oh boy is is a treat.

Besides the work itself, there are some nice touches, like this billboard-style greets the visitors with introductory information on the exhibit.

Ed studied alongside graphic design students at the California Institute of Arts, worked at a type foundry early in his career, and later even designed his own typeface, Boy Scout Utility Modern (as used in the top image here). I won't bother regurgitating from the press release, so here's an excerpt of an interview with the man himself instead:

Monumental Type

I mentioned in a previous post the opening credit sequence of the film Panic Room, which sets a foreboding tone for movie with the use of monumental 3-dimensional type, integrated into a sequence images of the buildings of upper Manhattan. The font (I think it's Copperplate Gothic) recalls the early 19th Century stone-carved lettering from the frontages of the societies and banks of the area, and it has an architectural quality appropriate to a film in which a room is the central character.

A film which uses the same technique to similar effect, albeit in a very different setting, is first-time director Duncan Jones' Moon (pictured above). Essentially a 1-man performance by actor Sam Rockwell, the film explores the theme of paranoia and madness as a result of extreme loneliness. As the text floats in the space around Rockwell's character as he works, it resembles a silent companion or invisible friend. Critics have described the film as concept sci-fi in the tradition of Tarkofsky, with a 70s-era retro-futuristic aesthtic. The accompanying publicity poster certainly fits the bill:

Next a couple of works by American painter Ed Ruscha (pronounced Ed Roo-SHAY... I always get that wrong). Ruscha apparently wanted to be a sign painter, but fell in with the wrong crowd. A retrospective of his 50-year career is currently showing at the Hayward Gallery.

Formerly a puppert-creator for psychedelic kids tv show Pee Wee's Playhouse, Wayne White these days creates paintings which sit just on the fun, folksy side of Ed Ruscha's work. With careful rendering of light, shadow and reflection, he integrates 3-dimensional type on to found thrift store paintings of often twee or sentimental landscapes.

Traditional wooden frames recall the canvases' former domestic status, and make them function as objects just as they do as images.

Text & Image: Stranger Than Fiction

These images are from the opening sequence of director Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction (2006). The graphics complement the narrator's introduction of the film's central character, Harold Crick, as a socially inept tax auditor with an obsessive reliance upon routine, and visually represent the way he interfaces with his environment.

Created by Kansas-based motion graphics company MK12, this is as good an example as I've seen of the integration of typography, or in this case type and infographics, into a 3-dimensional space. Their end credit sequence is also impressive, but is more of an exercise in wow-look-at-what-we-can-do kinetic collage than anything else.

The scene reminds be of the interface used in Minority Report (look at Tom Cruise trying to act!) and of the IKEA sequence from Fight Club, both made in 2002. There are so many fanboy tributes to the IKEA scene up on YouTube that I couldn't find the real one [in fact, I've just checked again, and it seems YouTube removed the original clips due to copyright infringement]. Here's a remake by MrBaker101, using the furniture in his own flat.

Fight Club seems to be one of those movies that inspires a certain kind of geek to animate their own kinetic typography sequences. Check out this...

...and this...

...and this!

There are literally dozens of these on YouTube, and they're all very poor indeed. So from this point on I'll keep F**** C*** at arm's length.

It occurs to me that there are several problems with using Stranger Than Fiction as the basis of a contextual theory essay. Since the scene takes place within a movie, there isn't much scope for the application of cultural context beyond say, "who is the film's target audience?".

I could look at the history of infographics, or other examples of animated infographic sequences, but for me it's the combination of live action and graphics that makes this work. Remove the sobering influence of real footage and things can start to get a little twee, like in this dreadful promo for Royksopp's Remind Me single (above), by French studio H5.

Finally, another good example of typography integrated into a 3-dimensional space is the opening credit sequence of Panic Room (2002), by Fight Club director David Fincher. There's a precedent for monumental type of this kind that dates back over a century, so I might look into this a little closer and with further comparisons in a later post.

Text & Image: trailers and title sequences

The other day I saw Marco Mucig's trailer for the 2009 Bicycle Film Festival. The trailer is playful, and because it provides a slow reveal of the name of the festival it intrigues the viewer for the full duration. There's a hi-NRG bicycle polo version too, but I prefer the original. This got me thinking that perhaps it would be a good idea to look at a trailer or opening title sequence for my first term VCT essay. Here are some examples I've been able to think of of the top of my head, all of which combine text and moving image successfully.

The standard of title sequences in American drama series has been raised in recent years. Strong examples include Six Feet Under, Mad Men (validated by its own Simpsons spoof), and Dexter.

Saul Bass' classic sequence from Anatomy of Murder is referenced by Kuntzel and Deygas' animated opening to Catch Me If You Can. Their AMEX ad is rather good too.

And the recent film adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen features a 6 minute opening credit sequence that spans almost half a century and provides a detailed context for the following 3 hours. Impressive stuff.

Summer Project

For the summer project I chose the advice "Work Hard Every Day". A good idea, I think, and I enjoyed the slightly militant Animal Farm feel to it.

I chose to treat the words like a mantra, repeating them to point at which they lost their meaning.

I created two fonts for the project - the first based on a diamond grid, the second on a triangular grid - and experimented with interlocking and repeating the phrase to create pattern.

I worked through many different versions, progressing from 2 to 3-D forms, ending up with this yellow and blue design.