District B13 Movie Title
The movie title for District B13 was a project for the class Typography Studio II at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Fall 2011.
The movie Disctrict B13 is a French action movie in which a police officer is put together with a small criminal to regain possession of a bomb that was stolen by a local drug lord in a district of Paris. The movie relies heavily on fast action and a sport called parcours, in which the athletes don’t see objects around them as obstacles but rather means to take different paths through their environment. Hence the athletes climb fences, run up walls, jump from roof to roof, all in a fluid interaction with their environment.
To reference this interaction between actor and environment, the typography for the movie title was placed onto objects in the setting of the scenes. The names of actors were mapped onto the walls of the surrounding buildings. This was accomplished by placing typography on 3D layers in Adobe After Effects and masking any actor that would move in front of the objects, to give the impression that the typography was really placed on the objects in the scenes. To further strengthen this effect, the typeface United Semi-Condensed Stencil was used, as the stencil aesthetic creates the feel that the text was sprayed onto the objects on which it appears.
To shorten the length of the movie title, several scenes, in which the placement of typographic elements would not have worked, were cut out in Adobe Premiere. The original soundtrack was replaced with the song “Firestarter” by The Prodigy, as its rhythm and aggressive sound matches the fast pace and intensity of the chase in this movie title.
