Bridging the Gap

Kansas City-based studio MK12 have release a new in-house project, the film short TELEPHONEME. As well as the film there is a single-page site where you can download the font (Chadwick) and digital press release. MK12′s co-founder Ben Radatz kindly shared this on Motionographer:

TELEPHONEME came about after we’d begun writing a short about how the alphabet was actually a “trojan horse” with coded messages and symbols, designed by a shadow group intent on keeping the rest of us down. While writing the piece we came across a Bell Labs-funded educational film called “The Alphabet Conspiracy,” which had pretty much the same content we were writing into our version. So we instead appropriated the voiceover and re-mixed it into a slightly darker version of itself. The voice is that of Frank Baxter, aka Dr. Research, a well-known figure in the educational film world. And, he tweets! We developed a typeface called “Chadwick” which we envisioned as a “root font” of sorts – a theoretically perfect and balanced font that concerned itself more with technical execution than visual aesthetics. This was the font that we used throughout the piece, and we set up a pretty rigid set of guidelines for it’s use. It’s not something that’s likely to be picked up on, but it made a good foundation for the rest of the piece. While voiceover is borrowed from the original film, the sound design was done in-house, borrowing from analog sources and mixing them into a very sight-for-see composition.

A great little package which shows the studios creativity and skills at blending shapes, type and textures with live action in a beautiful mnemonic colour palette.

Tags: animation / font / in-house / mk12 / retro / video / vintage / web
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