Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities takes a traveler through multiple cities that all reflect elements of the city of Venice, Italy.  Octavia, or Thin City 5, is an extremely ephemeral city built upon spider-webs stretching between the precipice of two mountains. 

 

For me, the beauty of Octavia is the knowledge that it has an end date, and by having that knowledge, the citizen’s of Octavia can enjoy life without thinking about the future. For this project I began by researching themes in the vein of living day by day. I read articles by atheists, philosopher’s, and life gurus. 

 

I decided to use the idea of life being made of moments as my conceptual base, which led to using each word within the story as its own moment. 

 

I realized after going through my own film clips from the past few years, that generally I do not take video of major life moments, but instead of these weird small moments that can seem insignificant, but for some reason make me want to grab my camera. This paired perfectly with my concept, so I decided to use these small clips from 2006 to today and paired them with the word moments from Octavia, although this created different qualities of film, I do not think it impedes the aesthetic, but actually improves it. 

 

The length of time the word is shown is based on the number of syllables in the word itself. One syllable is given 12 seconds, two is 15, three is 18, four is 20. I also gave the end of a sentence a full second to be used as a breath. These lengths were based off of trial and error and finding a balance between long enough, and too long.

 

There are 174 words in the story of Hypatia, and there is a clip for each one of them. Just over half were taken from previous footage, and the rest were filmed specifically for this project, and all were focused on small moments that are frequently overlooked or forgotten. 

 

I researched movie title screens for typography and placement of type, and determined through this research that centering the text, and using a sans serif that wasn’t too bold, but strong enough to not interact with different elements within the 174 clips was needed.

 

I used Avenir for its blend of angular but slightly softer nature than something like Futura and not something overly soft like Gill Sans. I used white text, something common in film titles, and with the added benefit that it can stand against the many different film clips. 

 

Centering the type has the other benefit of creating a battle for the viewer between paying attention to word or image, and since both are intriguing and moving quickly, I feel this drives home the idea of how quickly life and the moments that make up life can pass you by.