This month I’ve started researching a new animation project for a completely fantastic botanical story – another dream project for me! I can’t say more than that for now but it’s giving me an excuse to reflect on the equally lovely brief I worked on for Alnwick Castle, when I made a film about Capability Brown.
That project was perfect for using expressive typography to tell an emotive story (below) and also explain the facts about Brown’s hallmark landscaping techniques (above). The impact he had at Alnwick was radical, and I wanted to do that justice by using my typography skills to put big feeling into the animation – letterforms moving about and playing a big role in expressing the personality of the story.
I just love working with letterforms to bring emotion of a narrative alive, and when they dance with just the right music the effect can be powerful. A strong typographic style with character all of its own creates a strong and unifying visual theme for drawing together loads of different archive material too.
Capability Brown’s story was a brilliant chance for me to write a script with particular words that would communicate well through different typographic styles and locate us in specific parts of the story—fact or narrative detail—and I just loved rising to the challenge.
I can’t wait to get started on this next project! It’s going to be a perfect opportunity to push further in to my ideas about conveying brilliant things about the natural world with beautiful typographic expressions.
