Explosions in a Font Factory

We're watching HBO's Bored to Death, now in its second season, and once again enjoying the terrific opening titles as the main characters traipse through a world of words cut loose from the page. Designed by Tom Barham of Curious Pictures, the attention to words in motion is based on the fact that the show grew from a short story by Jonathan Ames published in McSweeney's, as well as from the idea that the main character is a writer. The show follows the hapless Jonathan, who decides to complement his not so lucrative writing career with freelance jobs as a PI; the character in the story and TV show are semi-autobiographical, and so it makes sense that the worlds of fact and imagination seem to mingle. In an interview on The Art of the Title Sequence, Barham says that he was interested in creating a world that was built from the text of Ames' imagination. He continues, "I wanted to do a combination character and flip-book animation to move the Jonathan character from location to location in a book format. Additionally, since the characters were made from text contained within the book where they exist they needed to move and interact with each other as if they were emitting or leaking letter forms and words."

The sequence earned an Emmy earlier this year, and it echoes a consistent trope of words leaving the page. I'm thinking of the November 2009 issue of Esquire, described as the first issue to include augmented reality techniques. It featured an image of Robert Downey Jr. sitting on top of a black-and-white graphic symbol that you could hold up to a webcam to produce seemingly 3D images. The intro sequence for the issue shows Downey Jr. standing in a storm of dissolved words. Together, these sequences nicely capture a poignant moment in 21st century culture as the confrontation between books and moving images culminates, and the formerly strict boundaries characterizing the two dissolve.

For a more chaotic vision of our current moment, take a look at thetitles for Enter the Void, Gaspar Noé's new film; the sequence is affectionately (and not inaccurately) described as an "explosion in a font factory" by The New Yorker's Anthony Lane.