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This is a film about fonts. There are no texts or letters though. Fonts are human characters living in a graphic design world, each of whom has unique properties. They team up to build a garden, but a negative space storm is coming.

5 mins | USA, Ukraine | 2022
production: self-produced
direction, animation: Nata Metlukh
sound design: Daruma Audio

idea

The idea of the film came from my old sketch, depicting fonts as characters.

This defamiliarization idea seemed promising to be the basis for the whole film, and I started to research typography and fonts, and how they can be portrayed by human characters.

Fonts are responsible for the look of typefaces - they define their style and size. In the film, objects change shape when fonts (most characters) interact with them. Bold makes things bolder, Italic tilts things, etc.

how fonts transform generic objects into stylized ones

setting

The story is set in a graphic design world, where fonts are building a garden. In fact, this garden is the poster of the film, and each film sequence features one of the title’s 9 letters.

R is represented by Wide and Condensed fonts,
E by Bold and Italic,
— by Heavy and Light,
G by Monospace,
U by Symbol,
L by Helvetica and Arial,
— by text fonts,
A by display fonts,
R by Comic Sans.

In the poster, the title letters are tied up by a blue ribbon, and in the film, we can see it as a blue border or a fence in each garden shot.

In the film, there are two shots that show the garden from above. It’s a hint to understanding that the garden is the film’s poster.

plot & characters

The opening scene is a POV of a pigeon - how it sees the world, constantly searching for food, checking potential pieces on the ground.

Condensed and Wide. When Condensed feeds crumbs to the pigeon, it becomes condensed too.

Fonts are playing ball until Cursor comes. She pairs them up for work in the garden. This scene comes from the experience of every graphic designer who was asked to play with fonts in their project. And it is known that fonts work best in pairs, so in the film they are teamed up.

Monospace equalizes everything by width.

The boxing wizards play an important role. “The five boxing wizards jump quickly” is a pangram, i.e. a sentence using all the letters of the alphabet. Pangrams are used by graphic designers to preview and check fonts. In the film, the wizards are inspectors who determine whether the fonts’ work is good or not.

Symbol is doing nothing until wizards spot him. Flustered, he tries to design a bench from a blank, but gets an alpaca and a milk carton instead, and gets fired.

Regular carries a line. Eventually, he cuts up the storm and fixes the garden’s layout by this line-grid.

While other fonts keep building the garden, Arial and Helvetica gather a negative space into a cube. Negative space is very important for these fonts - it’s well-balanced, increases the type’s readability, and holds the characters together.

When Arial and Helvetica accidentally drop the cube, it becomes a 4-dimensional cloud with uncontrollable rain, wiping everything in its path.

The last two big groups of characters are text and display fonts. In design, text fonts are the ones who do most of the work - they do not call much attention to themselves, and they are easy to read in long blocks of text. Conversely, display fonts are used in headings, and have more eccentric and variable design.

In the film, the workers are text fonts, and a group of designers - display fonts.