Mighty Nice: Melbourne Writers Festival

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