Forward Festival
Main Titles 2021
It was an honour to be invited by Forward Festival to create the main title film for this year’s programme of events. Titled ‘Threshold’, our film is a direct response to the festival’s format and mission to investigate the virtualisation and digitisation of our lives.
The threshold between the real and the virtual is the key to our concept; it’s the meeting point where spaces expand the minute we answer a video call or enter a gaming sphere. Our experiences in those moments mix together — we see other spaces, other homes and studios, and increasingly other virtual representations of the people we know.
The line is blurred and we’re crossing it.
Typography played a hero role in this sequence. We worked through a number of fonts and type systems to find the right tone and technical makeup to allow us to test and play out our mechanisms. Co-Type’s Coanda font had the right mix of digital and contemporary finesse as a face, along with perfect horizontal, vertical and diagonal strokes. This allowed us to break it down into a modular system, bringing individual elements together at pace to create the whole.
This project wasn’t approached as a classic narrative piece — it was all about R&D. Testing and learning from each of our processes, we were able to take our material and bring the sequence together, as one. Check some of the many experiments and tests that went into the film below.
