This is great.<p>I remember the first time I watched Moon and felt like I recognised the style of the design. Then later in the film when I saw the vehicles I thought to myself "That looks like massively like Gav's design"; referring to Gavin Rothery who I'd worked with a number of years earlier at a games company called Pure Entertainment.<p>We both worked on a title called Lunatik, which was a futuristic space game - I did the Playstation 3D graphics engine and he worked on the concept models for the spaceships, cities, etc. Very bladerunner-esque.<p>When I left the company we lost touch, so it was very nice to see his name up in lights on the credits 10 years later - and to just recognise his style without knowing that he'd worked on it.
Just a warning: if you haven't yet seen the movie, the article contains significant plot spoilers. Moon is a fantastic movie, so go watch it on Netflix then read all about the typography afterwards.
Something I excitedly noticed I've never been able to tell anyone because it's too specific:<p>Moon (2009) opens with the line "Where Are We Now?," the title of the first single off Bowie's new album (2013).<p>David Bowie is, of course, Duncan Jones' father.
I notice a recurring theme of '80s retro-futurism in Moon. It all looks like the way we imagined the future at the peak of the Space Shuttle, but with little nods to modern technology to avoid obvious anachronisms. Brilliant design.<p>For example, the black-backgrounded GUIs with wide text on them remind me of old DOS-era applications, but they're displayed on modern high-resolution flat-panel displays.<p>The T-shirt is also painfully '80s, as directly noted. The only music mentioned is an early-'90s song that was hokey the day it came out. The Flowbee and the magazine are other noted '80sisms.<p>The rescue-crew-manifest with poor-quality black-and-white images on a color screen? That could've been lifted directly from the '80s-era Alien films.<p>Which really, all makes sense - the '80s were the end of the space race. For space-travel nostalgia, that's where you go for modern Gen X movie fans.
This is a phenomenal Easter egg:
<a href="http://companycheck.co.uk/company/06346944" rel="nofollow">http://companycheck.co.uk/company/06346944</a>
(A corporate Id number for the fictional space mineral extraction company is flashed on a screen in the movie - a search on that corporate Id in the UK database shows its in fact a real registered corporation!)
> He’s keeping count of his days on the Moon with a dry-wipe marker on the bathroom wall. By my reckoning, this is 146 days and counting – not quite the nearly-three-years mentioned in the plot:<p>No, but 3 years is remarkably close to 146 weeks.
That was a fantastically entertaining analysis!<p>Not a typographical Easter egg, but one I noticed while reading: could the Eliza rescue team be a reference to the early 'robotic psychologist' ELIZA? That would fit with the other playful human/machine blurring in the movie.
Simply astounding. Wonderfully done. The wealth of typographical research into various movies is almost Limitless. Twelve Monkeys couldn't pull me away from this. Regardless of what Her's got to say about it.
What an absolutely wonderful idea for a blog.<p>I'd beseech you to do <i>Metropolis</i>, but I feel like that'd be a relatively short post, so to speak.
Before this post, I was thinking about watching Moon again. It's such an incredible and unknown film. I will watch it again.<p>If you haven't seen Moon, then the following song will not make sense, but the sense of desolation and uncertainty rhymes with the film. The ending of the song captures the denouement @ 7:20.<p><a href="http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Downfall/2VQtYZ" rel="nofollow">http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Downfall/2VQtYZ</a><p>Moon was fantastic.
Moon's score written by Clint Mansell is perfect.<p>Here's a link to a section often used in documentaries:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lUgqeO1ZxM&feature=player_detailpage#t=22" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lUgqeO1ZxM&feature=player_de...</a>
Love Moon, here is my article on Gerty <a href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2011/07/gerty-a-character-in-duncan-jones-moon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2011/07/gerty-a-character-in-...</a>
I'm not really a font nerd, but I disagree with:<p>"<i>Moon uses an interesting angular typeface for its location-establishing shot... This typeface is OCR-A, which was designed in 1968 for use in optical character recognition systems.... Moreover, it looks like THE FUTURE, and so it makes a perfect choice for on-screen interstitial positioning shots.</i>"<p>OCR-A does not look like THE FUTURE; it looks like the future in 1968. To me, it looks like bitterness and cynicism. Apparently, it looks that way to others, too, since it or something similar is used in the same way for every other similar movie.<p>I haven't seen the movie. Is that message typed out on the screen, complete with teletype noises? That <i>has</i> to be one of the weirdest anachronisms ever adopted as a trope.
Read this! I feel like having to rehydrate after all that dry wit. Here's a spoiler (seems only fitting) that illustrates the writing style:<p><i>Maybe I should go and have a lie down for a bit, and come back when the conspiracy theories have subsided. It’s a shame sci-fi films don’t have intermissions these days. Let’s transplant the one from my 2001: A Space Odyssey post, and go and have a cup of tea while the [characters] work out what to do next.</i><p><embedded <a href="http://typesetinthefuture.com/postfiles/2001/2001_intermission_full.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://typesetinthefuture.com/postfiles/2001/2001_intermissi...</a> >
I worked on the post-production of Moon, particularly the titles and the screens in the base and Gerty's face. Pretty humbling to have someone pay so much attention to what we did!<p>It's funny to hear about the Microstile/Eurostile differences - when we had to replace type that was on the real set we made new elements using Eurostile, so there are probably some inconsistencies.<p>The Bank Gothic/gradient fill/outline choice definitely haunted us for a while after - it was already a bit of a scifi poster trope but it's got out of control since. I've cringed a few times seeing posters on the tube and wished we'd picked something slightly different. I remember being keen on an outlandish faux-Cyrillic face at the time but it wasn't legible enough. I did win the argument about colour though - my boss at the time did a bunch of concept frames with translucent orange type for the main credit lines... there's a little interview with him here: <a href="http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/moon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/moon/</a><p>Maybe it's too obvious to bear mentioning but there's a big foreshadowing in the shot where Sam Rockwell's credit appears - a second copy of his name dissolves up out of focus further back inside the base...<p>The OCR-1A type was set by me, in a slight hurry as I recall, type-on effect and all. It had to look different to the Bank Gothic credit lines, and I'm sure we tried the obvious Eurostile and it wasn't readable or was too heavy for that amount of text. It feels a bit of a case of too many faces in succession, in retrospect. I love machine-specific typefaces. I think I first got into them after reading The Computer Contradictionary, which mentions E13B a couple of times, the type used for the numbers printed in magnetic ink on cheques: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognit...</a>. That book is worth a look if you appreciate a bit of cynical tech humour... <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tZKCZje8178C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tZKCZje8178C&printsec=fro...</a><p>The dot-matrix background on the text fields of the "big board" with the countdown on it was probably my bad also... we replaced that whole board wherever it appears in the film because the real prop had light leaking into the four harvester status lines and you could see they were acetate. We definitely tried having the letters formed by the actual dots but they weren't legible enough, and making the dots smaller made them not legible enough. Sense of nerd embarrassment. I guess it's some kind of future display technology with... big dots? Err...<p>Trivia: the postcard reading "wish you were here" was inserted in post because we had to cover up the real one which couldn't have its rights cleared ;)<p>More trivia: there was a spelling mistake on one of the panels on set, the one which says "satellite uplink" when Matt Berry is yelling at Gerty. It was caught by QC and I have some memory of fixing it for that shot since we'd inserted the video into that screen anyway, but it might be visible in other shots. It had "satellite" spelled "satelite".<p>Looking forward to more from that blog. I've thought of starting something similarly one-track, favourites being "over-obvious ND grad filters in film" or "non-circular lens vignettes done badly in post through the ages" or "10 worst skies graded without highlight rolloff" ^_^
I love it when fellow font nerds come out and proclaim their love of typography with wild abandon. People who are into type are <i>really</i> into type.
I was really jazzed when this came out. For me, it fell flat. Perhaps it needs a second viewing. Kudos for the use of models instead of cgi for this filmmaker, though -- pretty awesome decision. The results speak for themselves. Striking visuals!
For similar stuff, don't miss the link at the bottom to the blog of the designer behind the film:<p><a href="http://www.gavinrothery.com/moon-blog-index/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gavinrothery.com/moon-blog-index/</a>
My favourite thing (among many) about this article is finding out that Lunar Industries Ltd. is actually a registered company. Duncan Jones is indeed registered as a company director.<p>I'm not sure when filming started, but the company was registered just about two years before the film was released.<p>It's those small touches that make me really appreciate it.
Soylent is in this film! Predicting today's Soylent future food. <a href="http://soylent.me" rel="nofollow">http://soylent.me</a><p>I wonder if this is how Rob came up with the name for his future food.