Film Project - December - January 10th

I chose to work on Rashomon for the film project and, in a bid to please tutors by not reaching a solution too quickly, decided to work in my sketch book for the first week and stick to researching and brainstorming. I established that there could either be four parts of the film to address (each account of the four involved characters) or one part - by choosing the account of one of the characters and presenting it in a way in which it is affected by the others. Rashomon is a film of the hearing on a murder which has taken place in the woods. We are given the accounts of the wife, husband, bandit and an unfortunate witness. The film is ended with the true, witness's account. As the film is largely based on different personalities telling slghtly different accounts of the same story I felt it necessary to work with typography and try to develop something which is ultimately consistent but changes at the same time. The puzzling nature of the film to audiences was something that struck me and was what I wanted to communicate at first.

I eventually found that I was trying to communicate something too large and that it may have been more useful to focus on the victim of the murder , whose story is, to me, the most powerful. Considering the bandit's twitching, erratic tendancies and the innocence and frailty of the wife it was a shame that I couldn't explore those traits typogrpaphically. The dead man's account, which was given through a medium, was loud and punchy. This simple sense of anger and betrayal could be quite simply translated into a typogrpahical style by using simple, bold cut text in white on a black background and cropped quite aggressively. The cropping worked in communicating the sense that even though his words were loud and fierce they were delivered with a hesitant, threatened nature. Having drawn out an alphabet of cropped capitals by hand it was starting to make sense. Seeing the alphabet then done digitally was also interesting. It's more accurate look however didn't quite communicate the emotions of the dead man as well as a scruffy, hand-made cropping. The process of applying characteristics to typefaces or lettering was very enjoyable as it questioned what made me think of 'innocence' or 'madness' or 'anger'. 'Anger' for instance would be similar to 'madness' in that both would very distinct and highly contrasted to the norm. 'Anger' may suggest scratching, aggressive lines whereas 'madness' may incur strange and random collaborations of straight lines, curves, digital and hand drawn, large and small.