Exercise 3: Wordflow
Visualization: Screenplay
As I hadn't seen the film before, I began by scouting our the art direction of Moonrise Kingdom to see what typefaces, colours, textures, and graphic styling was used to build my own visualization. I decided to characterize everyone in the scene with their own texture and font. The background characters are showin in a whispy, wallflower type of paper texture, while Suzy is the dark, inverted, and sped up version of those patterns, and Sam is a crumpled and loud yellow texture. The two main characters cut through the scenes via the treatments of their voices.
Typefaces
For Sam, I picked a humanistic and simplistic font called Thonburi, that had quirks but not too many.
For Suzy, she became Courier, which is a font I associate with filmic things; I felt like her character was almost manic-pixie, kind of someone that an adolescent male playwright would dream up in the 90's for a cult film.
The rest of the characters were exaggerated versions of themselves on screen. The lady in charge is loud and condensed to fit in more words (Playbill), the background birds are frilly and petty (Aldine).
For the background texture, I wanted it to be varying throughout the scene, but speeding up in moments of tension or alarm. I cut it together using different frames of the texture in imovie and brought that together into After Effects as a background video.
Typographic Elements and Motion
I used different font choices and directional and motion cues to represent certain characters. The left side of the screen was the girls, and that text wiggled and fluttered as it came in throughout the scene to emulate the movement of birds. Suzy was dark yet light, unwavering and centered. Sam cut in from the right side, always interrupting and tilting things as he came in. The adult who enters to shoo him is overbearing and drops in from all corners of the screen, changing the speed of the frames and mood via the red tones of alarm.
Overall if I were to re-do this project, I'd like to work a little with the bezier/meshes to distort Suzy's layers. I had originally wanted to make her inverted background moving like a universe, in a black hole effect but this stopped the export/rendering process so I had to remove it. In the end, perhaps the bird-like nature of the background girls could have been more prominent with the type, in the future instead of just moving in, I'd like the text to vary and animate as it enters.
Final: