The ask of this brief was to typographically reimagine a chosen scene from a film in the form of a short-form book, limited to a two-colour palette so that expressive typography was the only tool to narrate any and all emotion and tacit context.
The movie I chose was The Master, a movie directed by Paul Thomas Anderson which was also considered his finest work. This movie centres on Freddie Quell, a war veteran who is quite the damaged individual, and the way he seeks refuge in a cult-like organization called The Cause and his affinity to its founder, Lancaster Dodd.
With extensive analysis of how well I could represent each scene typographically, I settled on the scene “Informal Processing” which is the scene where Freddie is introduced into The Cause’s cult-like practices. This scene is easily one of the most climactic scenes in the movie and it was fitting as the brief required us to choose a scene with a distinctive quality.
This scene which shows a dialogue between Dodd and Quell is said to be similar to the auditing process of Scientology which ties in perfectly with the inspiration behind the entire movie - L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
Within this dialogue, Dodd asks Quell extremely invasive questions and unearths much of Quell’s trauma. While Dodd is stoic and expressionless for most of the conversation, Quell undergoes quite the spectrum of emotion and I wanted to express this typographically as best as I could.
The way that I did this is, I maintained a uniform typeface and type treatment for much of Dodd’s stoic side of the conversation while employing fitting type treatments for Quell’s responses which accurately communicate the emotion he was feeling at the time.
Since Quell’s character is quite the anxiety-riddled one, I utilised a manual type treatments of the way I imagine a person riddled with anxiety would cut out letterforms and the result was quite the haphazard one with jagged edges which I found quite fitting for Quell’s personality so I decided to employ that treatment in places of the conversation where his anxiety shines through.
Similarly, I strongly believe the choice I made for colour - dark green, accurately communicates the somewhat restrained greed Dodd had towards unearthing Freddie’s traumatic past and the desperation he felt to make sure Freddie exited the processing as a follower of his cult.
The choice of paper was also chosen to narrate the overall imperfect nature of the scene with ivory with a slight texture instead of a brilliant white.
I also employed a page-folding technique that shows what Dodd says juxtaposed against what he actually means.
