Mighty Nice: Melbourne Writers Festival

mighty nice type

Typographic animation, it’s everywhere. You now get a free typographic animation with a box of breakfast cereal, and word has it that there’s an iPhone app for turning your shopping list into a twirling maelstrom of typographic glee. Apparently, Gary Busey is planning to turn himself into a typographic animation for an installation piece at The Whitney…

Anyhow, the point is that here at Motionographer Glades we kind of now feel that a typo animation now has to be pretty special to make the cut—which is definitely the case with this new cinema spot from Mighty Nice for The Melbourne Writers Festival.

Says Mighty Nice’s Darren Price:, “JWT Melbourne came to us with a straight brief: to animate type as it gets read by a voice over. Each genre of writing would see a change in the style of typography.”

And so it does. Type styles were meticulously mapped out by Mighty Nice’s art director, Softly Dunstan, who then contracted swine flu and dropped out of the picture, leaving the boys in charge.

“By the time the art director returned to the task,” says Price, “there were little girls turning into skeletons, spaceships and zombie hands added to the mix.”

What really surprised me is that all the voice over tracks were recorded by the authors themselves. The horror author sounds creepy, romance writer sounds sexy and the sci-fi author makes a great android… amazing.


Credits:
Director: Darren Price
Producer: Trish Knapp
Art Director: Softly Dunstan
Animation: Pete Nizic, Brad Pickford, and Darren Price

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About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

6 Comments

Joe Clay

That was awesome. The sound design was especially great. I love the trees casting a shadow of the word casting!

Lilian Darmono

My favourite bit is the kids in the trees ! dang, almost wanting to see a whole piece based on them alone…

oeuf

Such rich visuals alongside lush sounds.Either one alone, this piece would it not make…

Repeated viewings is a must!!!!

danielcoutinho

Have you guys seen these spots from Blur? They’re Great!
https://www.blur.com/toshiba_red.html# .

movecraft

I’ve been acutely aware lately that everything I think *looks* really good actually *sounds* really good. Good sound design is more important then animation polish, methinks.

Also, concept is king. That’s the difference between this piece and the hundred intonation type animation clones on youtube. Everyone can ape a few AE techniques but you can’t clone good ideas that solve the creative brief in a clever way.

rafaelmacho

I love the retro style being animated…so refreshing, nice to not see particles for once. :p

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