What movies and other media show words or numbers as quasi-physical things?
December 14, 2010 4:33 PM   Subscribe

What are some examples of media (movies, TV shows, commercials, or anything really) where text or data appears to have a real physical presence or materiality? Is there a name for the technique where you have words or graphics on screen that people or things can move around or destroy? When did this start becoming common? Are there similar examples from further back in the history of media?

I've been noticing lately how many movies have been presenting their credits or other text in a way that makes it a physical part of the environment.

The examples that come to mind right away are from Zombieland and Easy A, although I'm sure I've seen it in many more places than these. It's also similar to what happens at the beginning of Stranger than Fiction. In each case, there is floating text or data that appears to be part of the scene, but is not perceived by the characters.

What I'm thinking of is a bit different than letters or musical notes coming alive and interacting with people or each other, but cases where text or data seem to occupy a middle space between the audience and the characters, where they follow some physical laws.

(Other related things might include the famous UI from the Minority Report (although it is a central part of the scene), or the typography animations, like this one using audio from Pulp Fiction. I also have a vague memory of a recent commercial from around the Olympics, where athletes were doing various athletic things with numeric measurements following them in real-time.)



What are some other examples of this? What are the earliest cases of this? Is there a name for it? Are there instances of similar things being done in other media?
posted by mariokrat to Media & Arts (37 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 


Bob Dylan subterranean homesick blues
posted by canoehead at 4:52 PM on December 14, 2010


Panic Room's opening credits were giant letters over Manhattan that were reflected in windows, cast shadows, etc. but went unnoticed by the background players.
posted by infinitewindow at 5:01 PM on December 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Kansas City design outfit MK12 appears to have done the Stranger Than Fiction opener. They've been doing stuff like that for at least 10 years now, and small examples of the style you mention pervade their work. See: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

On a related note, you know that font that's everywhere, that looks a lot like the Twitter font but has more of a retro feel than the Twitter font? That's ultraloveninja. MK12 designed it 10-plus years ago, and now even the local business journal is using it to look cool.
posted by limeonaire at 5:01 PM on December 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure 'Fringe' uses these to establish locations.
posted by Think_Long at 5:02 PM on December 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


Oh, and to see many more examples of cool moving typography by MK12, see their YouTube channel here. They've been getting a ton of national and international work, it looks like, for some major companies and networks.
posted by limeonaire at 5:05 PM on December 14, 2010


Sorry, mariokrat, here's the link I messed up.
posted by tangerine at 5:09 PM on December 14, 2010


Hm, Check out the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Onscreen text is used aggressively throughout the film, though I can't recall whether the characters interact with the text or not.
posted by BClady at 5:11 PM on December 14, 2010


And actually, the style of that Pulp Fiction one appears to be pretty much a direct takeoff of MK12's style here from three years ago. The company has done a lot to popularize that type of heavily vector- and font-based video typography. There's a whole bunch of MK12 stuff in this YouTube reel of "motion ads," for instance.
posted by limeonaire at 5:14 PM on December 14, 2010


The first Crank has this, although it's arguable as to whether or not Chev Chelios actually knows he has that word written on his forehead.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 5:19 PM on December 14, 2010


Hm, Check out the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Onscreen text is used aggressively throughout the film, though I can't recall whether the characters interact with the text or not.

Yes. Scott actually grabs a 1UP at one point.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 5:20 PM on December 14, 2010


Apparently this sort of intersection of typography, vector art, and film is being called motionography.
posted by limeonaire at 5:30 PM on December 14, 2010


There was a fair amount of that in "Yellow Submarine". One segment in particular where the words the band was singing became solid, and that flying hand thing was trying to destroy those words.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:44 PM on December 14, 2010


This kind-of thing always reminds me of Will Eisnser.
posted by Chenko at 6:19 PM on December 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


*Eisner
posted by Chenko at 6:21 PM on December 14, 2010


Moon has what you're looking for and is also a totally awesome movie worth watching anyway in its opening title sequence.
posted by meese at 6:36 PM on December 14, 2010


How about the PBS kid show Ghost Writer?
posted by SMPA at 6:40 PM on December 14, 2010


Old school Electric Company is what you want.
posted by SisterHavana at 7:05 PM on December 14, 2010


I'm not 100% sure, but this might happen in I <3 Huckabees.
posted by dizziest at 7:08 PM on December 14, 2010


On of the first places I noticed this was in the opening credits for "Panic Room."
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:23 PM on December 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks for the responses so far, especially limeonaire. Some of the MK12 stuff is exactly what I'm thinking about, especially things like their Mastercard and Diesel ads, as well as the Stranger than Fiction opening.

Are there more examples? Is it a new thing? The Bob Dylan thing and the Pink Panther seem similar, but not quite what I'm looking for, partly because the text is part of the same universe that the people or characters depicting are occupying. (In this respect, the Minority Report link I had was probably going in the wrong direction.) What I think I'm looking for is uses of quasi-physical text or data that explicates some aspect of the universe being depicted in a way that is not necessarily accessible to people living in that universe.
posted by mariokrat at 7:54 PM on December 14, 2010


mariokrat, this may or may not be what you're looking for--but my memory of the ending to "Animal House" shows the various characters in their post-Faber life, with text commenting on what happened to them. IIRC, it's a typewriter font, as though it's a part of a permanent record.
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:06 PM on December 14, 2010


Response by poster: I think the term I've been looking for is 'augmented reality', but I've only noticed this being talked about in the last few years.
posted by mariokrat at 8:08 PM on December 14, 2010


There was also some of this in Steven Moffat's recent Sherlock Holmes miniseries, where little visual clues like text messages would float up into the scene.

Fincher's use of the technique in Panic Room was definitely what sparked the trend in the last decade. It was much-commented-upon when the movie came out. Here's Cinema Gotham's take:
When the theater went dark at the start of Panic Room, however, an audible gasp could be heard throughout the crowd. Fincher's credit sequences are always unique and worth noting and Panic Room's turned out to be a perfect little short film about the way New York looks.

Each credit appears as a set of austere stone letters floating above a New York street. Sometimes the camera swivels, sometimes it tracks side-to-side, sometimes it sits still. The sequence begins at the lower tip of Manhattan and slowly works its way, shot-by-shot, up to the film's Upper West Side location. The buildings reflect the history of New York architecture: turn-of-the-Century stone factory structures, modern glass-and-steel towers, cathedrals, water towers. Houston Street, Times Square, the Chrysler Building, Central Park. There is an awesome sense of scale and drama.

The addition of the letters, stone-carved giants, heightens the sense of foreboding. "Something's coming," it seems to say. "And it ain't gonna be fun."
You might find some more interesting stuff in the article, as it covers some of the CG tech used while also touching on the historical precedents in films like North by Northwest.
posted by bcwinters at 9:02 PM on December 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


Panic Room opening credits for me as well. Now every time I see them I think of Panic Room.
posted by dobbs at 11:52 PM on December 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


I don't know if this counts, but in Sergio Leoni's "Duck You Sucker" (1971) huge words appear over James Coburn's head. If I remember correctly, the say "Banco de Mesa Verde." In the movie, Rod Steiger plays an Mexican bandit who is obsessed with robbing the Mesa Verde bank. Coburn is a dynamite expert. And it's when Steiger first sees Coburn that the titles appear. The shot is from Steiger's p.o.v., and so it seems as if he can see the titles -- that they are in his head, labeling Coburn as someone who can help him rob the bank.

There are also some Warner Brothers cartoons that play with characters being able to read titles. There's one in which the THE END title appears too soon, and Daffy Duck pushes it off the screen.
posted by grumblebee at 6:32 AM on December 15, 2010


(This is a really good question, and I have a STRONG suspicion that this effect is much older than most of us think. I wish I could come up with an example, but I would be at all surprised if it occurs in a silent film or two -- at least in a cartoon if not a live feature. I'm wondering if Richard Lester ever played with this effect. I haven't seen all of his films, but it seems like something he'd do.)
posted by grumblebee at 6:35 AM on December 15, 2010


In the movie Volunteers there is a character with a (comically) bad accent so they give her subtitles. At one point the other characters just can't understand what they are saying so they end up reading the subtitles.

Here's the scene on the blog of one of the writers (he hates the scene).
posted by mikepop at 7:57 AM on December 15, 2010


Since you stated "media" I would also mention Splinter Cell : Conviction which uses much the same techniques as the show Fringe but also uses the background as a display for flashbacks etc.
posted by longbaugh at 8:18 AM on December 15, 2010


In Wayne's World (IIRC) during the Cantonese scene, Wayne says something in Cantonese, and then both he an Cassandra pause while they wait for the subtitles to translate it... does this count? It's character awareness of the subtitles...
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 8:44 AM on December 15, 2010


I don't think there is a formal term for the concept, but I've called it "diegetic titling," since the captions appear to exist within the fictional world, or diegesis.
posted by thadman at 9:14 AM on December 15, 2010


Can't believe no one's mentioned the recent BBC Sherlock Holmes. They use it all the time in very creative ways: a countdown clock, to show emails/texts, etc.
posted by 100watts at 10:28 AM on December 15, 2010


The opening credits in Panic Room are certainly striking. When I saw them I immediately thought of the IKEA scene in Fight Club, Fincher's previous movie. The scene of bombers dropping numbers in Fog of War also comes to mind as an example.
posted by Pork-Chop Express at 2:05 PM on December 15, 2010


augmented reality

Yeah, much of the current stuff, esp. the Stranger Than Fiction bit, reminds me of an HUD, or heads-up display, superimposed upon the world. That's actually how I got into MK12's stuff, I'm pretty sure; I associate getting acquainted with them with the time when I was visiting a lot of computer customization and theming message boards, many of which were actively developing programs to make the computer desktop have little widgets (e.g., for the current song on iTunes, the computer's current temperature and other stats) with that sort of moving text. This thread has a few examples of that sort of thing; I'd tell you about specific programs that achieve that effect, but I haven't followed the goings-on in that community for a while now, so I don't know what the state-of-the-art programs are anymore.

For people thinking through the consequences of potential real-world, brain-implanted heads-up displays, I'd suggest reading everything under the "shareable futures" tag here, as well as some of Cory Doctorow's recent books (e.g. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom).
posted by limeonaire at 3:00 PM on December 15, 2010


More detail on Fringe: Most of the time there's no interaction between the text and the environment, but there's at least one scene (in the 2nd season IIRC), where it's raining and you can see the rain bouncing off the text.
posted by shponglespore at 3:55 PM on December 15, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks for all the leads. Like Grumblebee, I'm surprised that there are no striking examples from further in the past. The North by Northwest inspiration for the Panic Room credits are something I'm going to look more closely at though.

limeonaire, the HUD connection occurred to me as well, and examples of those in film and elsewhere are probably plentiful, especially through the 1980s and 1990s. One of the things that's interesting to me about the more recent examples is that they are not from the point of view of any of the characters. In this respect, this 'diegetic titling' as thadman calls it, shares more in common with an omniscient narrator than an HUD.
posted by mariokrat at 5:38 PM on December 15, 2010


I think you'd like Dakota Skye. I thought of this AskMe while I watched it.

The main character can't be lied to--she sees the truth as subtitles whenever people try.
posted by chatongriffes at 5:19 PM on December 31, 2010


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