James Houston video good mmm.

Here are a couple of great films by recent Glasgow School of Art graduate James Houston. James has also recently made a bigger budget promo for Frightened Rabbit's Swim Until You Can't See Land, but while that features a innovative use of the humble maglite, it lacks the low-budget retro charm of this earlier effort for Official Secrets Act, or the effective huh??!-factor of this MTV promo. Enjoy.

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Mr. W

Nordpol + Hamburg won a Gold Lion Award at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards for this film promoting the use of wind-power for German company Epuron. Well done Nordpol + Hamburg!

Context: re-edited film trailers (good ones!)

I mentioned in a previous post that re-edited film trailers tend to be very bad, relying too heavily upon subtitles and toilet humour. Well to my surprise I've found some examples worthy of attention, each of which is true to the intended format, well put together, and manages to steer clear of knob-gags. While this has not much to do with graphic design per se, it's a very good a example of how context and editing can affect a message.

How about Stanley Kubrick's creepy psychological horror The Shining, as a romantic comedy...

...or musical West Side Story as 28 Days Later-style horror...

...or (and this is subtler than you might expect) Fight Club, in the style of Brokeback Mountain...

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.