regular

This is a film about fonts, but without any actual text or letters. Instead, the fonts are human characters living in a graphic design world, each with their own unique traits. They come together to create 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 for the film came from an old sketch I made, which depicted fonts as characters.

This defamiliarization idea seemed promising as the basis for the whole film, so I began researching typography and fonts, exploring how they could be represented by human characters.

Fonts are responsible for the appearance 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, and so on.

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 with a blue ribbon, which in the film appears as a blue border or fence in each garden shot.

In the film, there are two shots that show the garden from above, hinting that the garden is also the film’s poster.

plot & characters

The opening scene is from the POV of a pigeon, showing how it views the world while constantly searching for food and inspecting potential scraps on the ground.

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

Fonts are playing ball until Cursor arrives and pairs them up for work in the garden. This scene reflects the experience of every graphic designer who has been asked to “play” with fonts in their project. 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, a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet. Graphic designers use pangrams to preview and check fonts. In the film, the wizards serve as inspectors who evaluate the quality of the fonts' work.

Symbol is doing nothing until the wizards spot him. Flustered, he tries to design a bench from a blank, but instead ends up with an alpaca and a milk carton, leading to his dismissal.

Regular carries a line and eventually uses it to cut through the storm, fixing the garden's layout with a line-grid.

While the other fonts continue building the garden, Arial and Helvetica gather negative space into a cube. Negative space is crucial for these fonts—it’s well-balanced, enhances readability, and helps hold the characters together.

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

The last two major groups of characters are text and display fonts. In design, text fonts handle most of the work—they don't draw much attention to themselves and are easy to read in long blocks of text. Conversely, display fonts are used for headings and have more eccentric and variable designs.

In the film, the workers are text fonts, while the group of designers are display fonts.