ErinLaing.com

The font.

When you think about your credits, you have to think about what you want to communicate to your audience. For Birthday Girl, I wanted to communicate a sense of timelessness and maturity.

One of the reasons why I love Woody Allen’s credits is because they never feel dated. I didn’t want to look back on my film in ten years and cringe at the sight of an outdated font. Nothing in the film suggests a time period, from the production design to the costumes, so I didn’t want the font to be any different.

Even though the film is about kids and takes place at a birthday party, I wanted to communicate a sense of maturity. It’s how I see my main character.

We spent a lot of time deciding on the proper font for the film. Before we even began filming, Matt was suggesting we use Adobe Caslon Pro for the credits, an elegant font used in French Vogue.

The font was a perfect combination of timelessness and sophistication.

The credits.

I wanted to keep the opening credits simple. It’s a 13 minute film and I thought anything other than the film’s title would have been excessive.

We tried placing the title over images, we tried a red title with a black background, but in the end, white on black was the most natural and least obtrusive.

End credits.

We ran into some problems after watching the first test print on 35 mm. We were using Caslon for the end credits as well, but didn’t realise that at a smaller size, the vertical lines in some letters, such as “N” or “R” virtually disappeared. The cast and crew names were illegible as the credits scrolled up.

I wanted to keep the font consistent with the rest of the film, so I insisted that we find another serif font that had the same qualities as Caslon. I think everyone thought I was crazy that I cared whether or not the cast and crew names were in Arial or Georgia, but it was so important to me that the film be consistent from beginning to end. Details!

At the last minute we stumbled upon Cheltenhm BdHd BT. It’s quite different from Caslon, but at a smaller size it was perfect. Thick, legible, elegant and timeless.