Company

Redwood Pictures

Designed

2011–2012

Role

Designer
Animator

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I worked with writer/producers Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine as well as director Emily Lou to design the opening titles for their Redwood Pictures’ independent horror-comedy feature, The Selling, which premiered at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood in October 2012.

I painstakingly animated the titles frame-by-frame by hand, then composited and edited with Geoff Mann’s whimsically spooky score. 

Sensibility

Modern. Bold. Hand-crafted. The Selling is a film full of homages and history. We settled on a mid-century modern aesthetic for the opening sequence. In the film, the characters are especially affected by their environment and circumstance. To signal this in the credit sequence, the actual titles become a part of this environment and something with which the characters can interact. 

Typography

To help strike this modern tone, I chose the pre-Helvetica grotesque of choice: Univers Condensed. To add to the handcrafted feel, I cut out multiple versions of each letterform to reduce repetition of specific curves and angles. This added a playful, yet unsettling quality to the titles, establishing a mood that would be carried throughout the film.

Characters

Despite its eventful plot, The Selling is a character-driven film. Inspired in part by Ernest Pintoff's Flebus (1957), the white-painted characters in the titles are simple and distinct against their black and red environment.

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I utilized composite photography, hand-drawn elements, and the custom typeface from the opening titles to produce this poster that traveled the festival circuit along with the film.