I wanted to let you all know about two movies that have come out recently that have both used motion graphics and informational graphics to great effect. Both are better known for their main content; “An Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore’s movie about global warming and “Thank You For Smoking”, a movie about a Big Tobacco lobbyist.
“An Inconvenient Truth” is as engaging and compelling as the reviews say it is. For a film/documentary/infomerical that is heavy with statistical information, it told its story very well. The movie is thoroughly peppered with graphs, charts, and diagrams that were clearly designed to be functional, and understandable but more importantly were made a part of the storytelling itself.
When a chart displaying the deep correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature is shown, rather than just simply flatly showing the data, the data is allowed to reveal itself, becoming an ascending jagged mountain range animating from left to right. And for added effect the line continues dramatically skyward when Gore predicts what will happen in fifty years. Simple effective storytelling techniques used for seemingly dry statistical data, used with powerful results. Incidentally, the presentation isn’t using MS Powerpoint but rather Apple’s Keynote.
The other movie that released a few months back was ‘Thank You For Smoking” and instead of informational graphics, the movie’s opening credits featured some amazing motion graphics.
Thank You For Smoking is centred around a Big Tobacco Washington DC lobbyist, Nick Naylor. His incredible ability to be morally flexible makes him a very likeable (if inherently despicable) character. But before you see any of the movie per se, the film’s opening titles left me awe struck. They were just fantastic. Created by Shadowplay Studio, the several minute long sequence so perfectly captures the graphic design elements that make up distinctive cigarette packaging. While I’ve never really paid that much attention to cigarette packaging before, every segment is bang on. From the typefaces selected and colour arrangments I realised that cigarette packaging have such a distintive visual language of their own. Enough even that if you pay enough attention to the references that span decades, you can recreate it faithfully.
The whole title sequence is available here.
