Performing the notebook type

You may have noticed in the JPEGs from earlier in the week that the notebooks have typewritten notes pasted here and there. Here's the story of their development.

My first inclination was to use a real typewriter so I borrowed my neighbor's electric. But the resulting letters looked too thin and crisp. As is often the case, the real thing didn't look like the real thing! So I created the document in Illustrator using the MS Gothic font. Even though the actual typewriter page didn't work visually, the typing experience itself was worthwhile. It gave me the idea to recreate some of my typing errors in the Illustrator document. It also gave me a sense of about how many errors I made. It's sort of like playing an accent. You don't want to overdo it.

One reason I chose MS Gothic is because it conjures for me my experience with the ubiquitous Selectric which I used in my stint as a secretary and also for personal projects back in high school. The Selectric association justifies the type's consistency. To my eye, it just looks a lot better and more authentic than typical typewriter fonts. A typewriter font like American Typewriter just looks wrong. It isn't capable of recreating the pressure inconsistencies that you get with a real typewriter. Plus as vector files, fonts aren't capable of creating the effect of inked edges soaking into paper. Look at the chunky, poorly-drawn outline of the "n" below. It screams "computer" to me as in bad bezier curves. I look at the font and I never think typewriter. I think cheap, distressed auto-traced font made in the nineties that you can download for free.



It never occurred to me until now that the reason I'm spending so much time on these props is that at this point, they are supposed to be carrying the film. And I know that whenever I see something on screen that looks like some lazy Word file trying to stand in for a newspaper, etc., I just get taken out of the story. It reminds me of when I saw AI. There's a scene in a lab where sitting right there on a table is one of those old iMac sub woofers. It took me right out of the film. For our project, even the Scotch tape is important. I always use shiny tape for props, not the matte "magic" tape. The magic tape just looks wrong. For me, all that textural stuff really makes a difference especially when we're shooting this close. So in the notebooks we have a real photo, real vintage grid paper, regular bond print outs, transparencies, real handwriting, shiny Scotch tape and real photo corners. Without the visual variety in texture and reflectivity, everything looks fake, flat and uninteresting. The test will be to see if all of this really makes a difference on screen.