Client:
Twin Brains Films (Dir. Xavier Tera)Year:
2024Role(s):
Art direction, typography, graphic design, motion design 

Stings

Stings means a number of things in the film. All the characters are damaged in some way—assorted traumas, however brief, left them scarred or at least inflamed. The suddenness of an insect sting and then the lingering/developing discomfort/inflammation made me think of subliminal messaging, that flash and then the afterimage. Xavier’s decision to put the title later in the film, when a character is literally stung, only heightens the unexpectedness. This afforded an opportunity to tightly integrate graphic moments with the footage—which one gets less often than one would expect.

The main idea for the title text was big, red, inflamed. I stretched it out horizontally to impart a wrongness, an intensity, a swelling, which I think works quite well without being too literal. 
That’s always a question: do the titles live inside the world (tonally, color, etc.) or are they something that calls attention to the structure or filmness? In this case, the title steps into and out of the narrative space in a way, so ultimately we landed on a red grabbed from a car taillight from the carwash scene (hence aligned with color grade) rather than the more…shall we say, “insane”…red that I had originally proposed. And it’s good! (Plus I was able to reuse that red in something else later)

I think I showed one sketch, maybe two, complete with the subliminal flash, and the response was “yes, this is it!” so then everything else followed from there. Knockout title cards build interest by playing on and prolonging the mystery of the opening audio and visuals, with Mincho type (Clarendon for Roman letters) as a starting place due to its use in Taiwanese shipping vessels.

Bilingual credits are a challenge and I think these strike a great balance between legibility/polish and the raw/lived-in world established by the spaces that the characters inhabit. To balance things out, since the title is stretched horizontally, credits are compressed.

A promo poster for the Tokyo premiere event uses the bee on table and a Taiwanese window cage motif—one of the things I was most struck by from the trip I took there years ago, and that also gets some screen time. 

Stings premiered at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (in France—no big deal). I really like the additional trailer title card (white one red) so that’s also posted above!