
Moon - edj
http://typesetinthefuture.com/moon/
======
louthy
This is great.

I remember the first time I watched Moon and felt like I recognised the style
of the design. Then later in the film when I saw the vehicles I thought to
myself "That looks like massively like Gav's design"; referring to Gavin
Rothery who I'd worked with a number of years earlier at a games company
called Pure Entertainment.

We both worked on a title called Lunatik, which was a futuristic space game -
I did the Playstation 3D graphics engine and he worked on the concept models
for the spaceships, cities, etc. Very bladerunner-esque.

When I left the company we lost touch, so it was very nice to see his name up
in lights on the credits 10 years later - and to just recognise his style
without knowing that he'd worked on it.

------
biot
Just a warning: if you haven't yet seen the movie, the article contains
significant plot spoilers. Moon is a fantastic movie, so go watch it on
Netflix then read all about the typography afterwards.

~~~
grey-area
This is a great film, but I'm not sure why knowing more about the plot or the
background to the design would ruin it for you? Do you also worry about
spoilers for works of literature or films from the past? What about spoilers
for young people on the entirety of human output?

I agree everyone should go watch this film, as it was really fascinating and a
probably far more realistic take on living in space than most - the boredom,
paranoia and drudgery were very effective - I feel compelled to stop
discussing it here though in case I violate your no spoilers rule! I think
I'll watch it again sometime, and I'll probably enjoy it more, not less,
having read some of the discussion here and knowing more about it, and having
seen all the twists of the plot already. Those are the least enjoyable and
least important parts of the enjoyment of the film, and a focus on them omits
all the other fascinating parts of this story (the repetition, the model-
making as a way of escape, the corporation that controls his life, the
convincing drudgery of space etc).

If you really don't like spoilers, don't click on discussions which purport to
be about the film until you see it, or stop reading them as soon as the film
is mentioned. That's really the only solution for you, and more effective than
calling for no spoilers. Where did this recent obsession with spoilers come
from?

A great story should not need the prop of plot-twists to be enjoyable - there
are so many facets of entertainment which don't depend on plot (character,
narration, allusions, themes, language, even setting and typography as here!).
Stories like The Odyssey or Julius Caesar are not ruined by knowing the plot,
because the pleasure is in the telling (and sometimes the retelling) and
worrying over spoilers shuts down any sort of significant discussion of a film
or story. To me shutting down all that discussion is far more damaging than
any potential loss of momentary surprise when something happens you didn't
expect.

~~~
icambron
I disagree. Even without plot twists, a movie is often a process of discovery.
You explore the character, narration, allusions, themes, and language in the
order they're shown in the film. And Moon in particular is such a carefully
paced movie. So while I agree that the plot spoilers may not matter much in
this case, I think you'd have a much different and likely inferior experience
watching Moon after reading this because of all the other stuff it reveals.

So what Biot said: go watch Moon and then come back and read this excellent
blog post.

~~~
grey-area
If you do consistently find things spoiled by foreknowledge, there is a simple
solution - just avoid reading articles or discussions which mention the film
before you see it (stop reading at the word Moon!), no need to call out
_spoilers_ because every meaningful discussion of this film will be a spoiler
in some sense, and many people enjoy discussing films and books online after
or before they see them. I'm not sure where this cult of _no-spoilers_ has
come from, but it damages public discussion - all content could be spoilers
for someone so reviews become a cryptic set of hints instead of a full
discussion with examples and no-one can speak frankly about stories without
hearing 'spoilers'. The responsibility for avoiding exposure should fall on
the person who doesn't want to know things, rather than on everyone else.

It's interesting, because I find more pleasure sometimes in rereading a book
or watching a film again than the first time, specifically because of having a
deeper understanding of it, the background to the characters, other films like
it, and perhaps noticing things that were missed the first time round. Broader
knowledge (from others or from previous experiences) actually helps further
enjoyment in many cases, because it deepens your understanding when you are
exposed. So I'd say go ahead and enjoy reading about things beforehand, you
may well find it actually improves the experience - in some cases like James
Joyce, or to a lesser extent Shakespeare, it becomes almost essential.

~~~
andyjohnson0
Like you, I often re-read books or re-watch DVDs. But I find the enjoyment
that I gain from this is different the first reading/viewing, and I'd prefer
to experience both. Spoilers would detract from this.

~~~
twocows
Different strokes. I find that spoilers make me more interested in how the
story unfolds, personally. But yes, I understand that a lot of folks don't
like them.

------
dmazin
Something I excitedly noticed I've never been able to tell anyone because it's
too specific:

Moon (2009) opens with the line "Where Are We Now?," the title of the first
single off Bowie's new album (2013).

David Bowie is, of course, Duncan Jones' father.

~~~
ericd
Damn, that's a really cool easter egg, thanks for sharing.

------
Pxtl
I notice a recurring theme of '80s retro-futurism in Moon. It all looks like
the way we imagined the future at the peak of the Space Shuttle, but with
little nods to modern technology to avoid obvious anachronisms. Brilliant
design.

For example, the black-backgrounded GUIs with wide text on them remind me of
old DOS-era applications, but they're displayed on modern high-resolution
flat-panel displays.

The T-shirt is also painfully '80s, as directly noted. The only music
mentioned is an early-'90s song that was hokey the day it came out. The
Flowbee and the magazine are other noted '80sisms.

The rescue-crew-manifest with poor-quality black-and-white images on a color
screen? That could've been lifted directly from the '80s-era Alien films.

Which really, all makes sense - the '80s were the end of the space race. For
space-travel nostalgia, that's where you go for modern Gen X movie fans.

~~~
dave_addey
Very interesting! My follow-up post to _Moon_ is actually _Alien_ , and I've
come to a similar realization. I reckon the main reason that _2001: A Space
Odyssey_ hasn't aged half as much as _Alien_ , or _Silent Running_ , or other
70s/80s sci-fi, is that in _2001_ , all of the monitors are flat-screen
displays, not curved CRTs. Ironically, this is only because they didn't have
the computing power to generate the HAL graphics on an actual computer, and so
it was all hand-animated on film and then back-projected onto a flat display.
This combination of flatness and high-resolution animation means that it looks
just like the retina displays of today.

~~~
Pxtl
It's worth contrasting against contemporary SF films that don't stylistically
tie themselves to the past - look at Sunshine with its touchscreens, or
Children of Men with the hyperflat TVs, or minority report with the gesture-
driven holograms.

------
kitcar
This is a phenomenal Easter egg:
[http://companycheck.co.uk/company/06346944](http://companycheck.co.uk/company/06346944)
(A corporate Id number for the fictional space mineral extraction company is
flashed on a screen in the movie - a search on that corporate Id in the UK
database shows its in fact a real registered corporation!)

~~~
dave_addey
Yep – turns out Lunar Industries Ltd. was the name of the production company
they set up when they made the film, and that is indeed their registered
company number.

------
shmageggy
> He’s keeping count of his days on the Moon with a dry-wipe marker on the
> bathroom wall. By my reckoning, this is 146 days and counting – not quite
> the nearly-three-years mentioned in the plot:

No, but 3 years is remarkably close to 146 weeks.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
There are actually 156 smiley's on the wall, which is (of course) exactly 3
years.

~~~
dave_addey
Good spot, sir! Turns out I miscounted. I've updated the article to include a
correction.

------
catmanjan
The haircut machine in Moon blew my mind, I can't believe it actually exists,
and on such a prestigious domain name!

www.haircut.com

~~~
beachstartup
if you're a child of the 80s you'll also recognize:

[http://www.flowbee.com](http://www.flowbee.com)

~~~
Crito
I've actually used one of these once. Once.

If I cared that little about how my hair looks, I'd just get some clippers.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I thought Flowbee was just clippers - the thing I hate most about cutting hair
is the hair getting everywhere, especially short clippings. That's exactly the
pain point being addressed with vacuum haircutting isn't it.

~~~
Pxtl
The vacuum also provides suction to pull the hair straight, I think. Notice
how a barber pulls your hair out straight with a comb to see the length while
cutting? The suction gets you that service.

------
taliesinb
That was a fantastically entertaining analysis!

Not a typographical Easter egg, but one I noticed while reading: could the
Eliza rescue team be a reference to the early 'robotic psychologist' ELIZA?
That would fit with the other playful human/machine blurring in the movie.

~~~
zhs
Hahaha I didn't think about that but that would also be clever. Another
possible explanation is the Eliza Protocol which I understand is involved in
protein breakdown – not unlike the way his body breaks down.
[http://www.piercenet.com/method/overview-protein-protein-
int...](http://www.piercenet.com/method/overview-protein-protein-interaction-
analysis)

~~~
robbiep
More protein identification rather than breakdown

~~~
sigmaml
That is ELISA (with an `S'), if I understand what you mean correctly.

------
ChuckFrank
Simply astounding. Wonderfully done. The wealth of typographical research into
various movies is almost Limitless. Twelve Monkeys couldn't pull me away from
this. Regardless of what Her's got to say about it.

~~~
bherms
Gene?

------
jmduke
What an absolutely wonderful idea for a blog.

I'd beseech you to do _Metropolis_ , but I feel like that'd be a relatively
short post, so to speak.

~~~
Intermernet
There's a very short article on the typography of _Metropolis_ available here:
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/21906884/Artistic-Typography-in-
Me...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/21906884/Artistic-Typography-in-Metropolis)

I too would love to see a more detailed blog post on Typography and
_Metropolis_ as it's a hugely important part of the film's style and sense of
"future".

------
CoffeeDregs
Before this post, I was thinking about watching Moon again. It's such an
incredible and unknown film. I will watch it again.

If you haven't seen Moon, then the following song will not make sense, but the
sense of desolation and uncertainty rhymes with the film. The ending of the
song captures the denouement @ 7:20.

[http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Downfall/2VQtYZ](http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Downfall/2VQtYZ)

Moon was fantastic.

~~~
_mulder_
Clint Mansell's original soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. I read they
managed to get him involved in the film because it was during the writers
strike 07-08 (remember that?!) and Hollywood had ground to a halt, hence
Mansell and ilk were looking for projects to keep them active.

I like your song, but it's a different vibe. To my ear, it sounds a bit too
military to be Moon. I do like the vintage synth sounds though!

~~~
lcrs
I remember hearing at the time that the reason they were able to build such a
big set for the moon base was because the stages were mostly empty, also due
to the writers' strike.

------
timClicks
Two posts in and already my favourite blog. The editorial rigour, attention to
detail and depth of knowledge are outstanding.

------
biffa
Moon's score written by Clint Mansell is perfect.

Here's a link to a section often used in documentaries:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lUgqeO1ZxM&feature=player_de...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lUgqeO1ZxM&feature=player_detailpage#t=22)

~~~
girvo
I haven't seen Moon, and stopped reading the OP when it got to spoilers.
Finding out about Clint Mansell doing the score from your post has completely
convinced me to watch it!

~~~
sneak
Oh, Moon is absolutely fantastic. See it immediately, and use headphones.

------
jmount
Love Moon, here is my article on Gerty [http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2011/07/gerty-a-character-in-...](http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2011/07/gerty-a-character-in-duncan-jones-moon/)

------
mcguire
I'm not really a font nerd, but I disagree with:

" _Moon uses an interesting angular typeface for its location-establishing
shot... This typeface is OCR-A, which was designed in 1968 for use in optical
character recognition systems.... Moreover, it looks like THE FUTURE, and so
it makes a perfect choice for on-screen interstitial positioning shots._ "

OCR-A does not look like THE FUTURE; it looks like the future in 1968. To me,
it looks like bitterness and cynicism. Apparently, it looks that way to
others, too, since it or something similar is used in the same way for every
other similar movie.

I haven't seen the movie. Is that message typed out on the screen, complete
with teletype noises? That _has_ to be one of the weirdest anachronisms ever
adopted as a trope.

~~~
sevia
> I haven't seen the movie. Is that message typed out on the screen, complete
> with teletype noises?

It is. I think it's necessary in this case - it's used as a mechanism to
distinguish it from the credits, which are being displayed at the same time
(e.g. [1] from the next shot). The typing noise and animation causes the
audience to pay attention to it, even if they weren't paying attention to the
credits.

In most other cases, it's just foley - audiences expect to hear futuristic
computer-clicky noises to accompany their space-text, so it feels weirder to
leave it out than to leave it in.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/hrsqgoA.png](http://i.imgur.com/hrsqgoA.png)

------
derefr
Another good blog on a similar topic:
[http://www.scifiinterfaces.com/](http://www.scifiinterfaces.com/)

------
morsch
Read this! I feel like having to rehydrate after all that dry wit. Here's a
spoiler (seems only fitting) that illustrates the writing style:

 _Maybe I should go and have a lie down for a bit, and come back when the
conspiracy theories have subsided. It’s a shame sci-fi films don’t have
intermissions these days. Let’s transplant the one from my 2001: A Space
Odyssey post, and go and have a cup of tea while the [characters] work out
what to do next._

<embedded
[http://typesetinthefuture.com/postfiles/2001/2001_intermissi...](http://typesetinthefuture.com/postfiles/2001/2001_intermission_full.jpg)
>

------
lcrs
I worked on the post-production of Moon, particularly the titles and the
screens in the base and Gerty's face. Pretty humbling to have someone pay so
much attention to what we did!

It's funny to hear about the Microstile/Eurostile differences - when we had to
replace type that was on the real set we made new elements using Eurostile, so
there are probably some inconsistencies.

The Bank Gothic/gradient fill/outline choice definitely haunted us for a while
after - it was already a bit of a scifi poster trope but it's got out of
control since. I've cringed a few times seeing posters on the tube and wished
we'd picked something slightly different. I remember being keen on an
outlandish faux-Cyrillic face at the time but it wasn't legible enough. I did
win the argument about colour though - my boss at the time did a bunch of
concept frames with translucent orange type for the main credit lines...
there's a little interview with him here:
[http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/moon/](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/moon/)

Maybe it's too obvious to bear mentioning but there's a big foreshadowing in
the shot where Sam Rockwell's credit appears - a second copy of his name
dissolves up out of focus further back inside the base...

The OCR-1A type was set by me, in a slight hurry as I recall, type-on effect
and all. It had to look different to the Bank Gothic credit lines, and I'm
sure we tried the obvious Eurostile and it wasn't readable or was too heavy
for that amount of text. It feels a bit of a case of too many faces in
succession, in retrospect. I love machine-specific typefaces. I think I first
got into them after reading The Computer Contradictionary, which mentions E13B
a couple of times, the type used for the numbers printed in magnetic ink on
cheques:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition).
That book is worth a look if you appreciate a bit of cynical tech humour...
[http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tZKCZje8178C&printsec=fro...](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tZKCZje8178C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)

The dot-matrix background on the text fields of the "big board" with the
countdown on it was probably my bad also... we replaced that whole board
wherever it appears in the film because the real prop had light leaking into
the four harvester status lines and you could see they were acetate. We
definitely tried having the letters formed by the actual dots but they weren't
legible enough, and making the dots smaller made them not legible enough.
Sense of nerd embarrassment. I guess it's some kind of future display
technology with... big dots? Err...

Trivia: the postcard reading "wish you were here" was inserted in post because
we had to cover up the real one which couldn't have its rights cleared ;)

More trivia: there was a spelling mistake on one of the panels on set, the one
which says "satellite uplink" when Matt Berry is yelling at Gerty. It was
caught by QC and I have some memory of fixing it for that shot since we'd
inserted the video into that screen anyway, but it might be visible in other
shots. It had "satellite" spelled "satelite".

Looking forward to more from that blog. I've thought of starting something
similarly one-track, favourites being "over-obvious ND grad filters in film"
or "non-circular lens vignettes done badly in post through the ages" or "10
worst skies graded without highlight rolloff" ^_^

~~~
dave_addey
Wow – that's some cracking trivia! I spotted (but chose to ignore) the
‘satellite’ typo – I think it's actually ‘sattelite’ when it appears on
screen.

Please do post this as a comment to the original blog post as well – I'd love
for people to be able to read it after they've finished reading my article.
And thanks for the kind words about the blog – there's plenty more where that
came from :)

------
dangayle
I love it when fellow font nerds come out and proclaim their love of
typography with wild abandon. People who are into type are _really_ into type.

------
Ntrails
Just FYI there is a mildly NWS image in here, (a shower scene bum). Not the
end of the world, but my scroll timing was suboptimal :(

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The internet approved acronym is NSFW.

~~~
itsameta4
Not if you've been around long enough to be a regular on Slashdot,
SomethingAwful, or Fark.

~~~
randallsquared
As someone with a five digit /. uid, I feel I've been around long enough. NSFW
won some time ago.

------
_nato_
I was really jazzed when this came out. For me, it fell flat. Perhaps it needs
a second viewing. Kudos for the use of models instead of cgi for this
filmmaker, though -- pretty awesome decision. The results speak for
themselves. Striking visuals!

~~~
stevejalim
I saw a post-screening Q&A with Duncan Jones and co-creators a few years back
and he mentioned that when they were prepping to make Moon, it was around the
time of the Hollywood writer's strike, so there were lots of productions on
hold, which had the happy side-effect of meaning there were some awesome old-
school FX people available to work on Moon.

~~~
_nato_
No kidding! I recall that strike, and had no idea. Thanks for sharing.

------
bwhmather
For similar stuff, don't miss the link at the bottom to the blog of the
designer behind the film:

[http://www.gavinrothery.com/moon-blog-
index/](http://www.gavinrothery.com/moon-blog-index/)

------
arc_of_descent
Beautiful beautiful movie! Sorry didn't read the article though. I'm going to
watch the movie again today. Work can wait!

------
gerjomarty
My favourite thing (among many) about this article is finding out that Lunar
Industries Ltd. is actually a registered company. Duncan Jones is indeed
registered as a company director.

I'm not sure when filming started, but the company was registered just about
two years before the film was released.

It's those small touches that make me really appreciate it.

------
chiph
Can I nominate the _Aliens_ franchise for your next post? The Weyland-Yutani
logo looks similar to Eurostile, but the W is much broader.

------
sogen
The "friendly rescue crew" have names like Rap _14_ and Dop _1_ , so they are
clones too!

------
beachstartup
moon was a great movie. it was the movie oblivion could have been.

------
Corvinex
Soylent is in this film! Predicting today's Soylent future food.
[http://soylent.me](http://soylent.me)

I wonder if this is how Rob came up with the name for his future food.

~~~
robertdobbs1
Good god I hope you are kidding and not an idiot.

~~~
bestdayever
Not knowing random pop culture references makes you an idiot these days,
interesting.

~~~
robertdobbs1
No calling Soylent future food repeatedly is. But based on their follow up
comment they were kidding.

------
untilHellbanned
looks like Dogecoin just got another font

------
personjerry
TO THE MOON!

~~~
bestdayever
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUySpaNRypw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUySpaNRypw)

