Demos

Film stills and type thrown onto a folded poster by a projector you can move around a room. Reflectance lighting, folds and creases, lifted sheets, video, high-res export — plus the mask tool, splice transition, and the control and direct-manipulation labs.

The four-line Frutiger mark, fitted to the reference setting pixel for pixel, with each letter scaled by a simplex noise field around its own position so the letters swell into each other. Eight looks — knock-out, overprint, skyline, outline and more — plus a live grid of all of them at once.

The identity system: one rule per year, each with a static logo, a motion logo and how the rule treats images beyond the logo. The ten type rules, plus thirty more drawn from film technique, light, and the house language of the cinema — please remain seated, admit one, contains flashing images. Built on the 6 × 4 grid: 24 cells for the mark's 24 letters.

Year one: all content must be brought into alignment. There is one viewpoint, the centre, and everything turns away from it by exactly as much as its position demands. Nine experiments: a website built on the real GSFF26 programme, a programme poster, a poster builder, lobby signage, motion studies, programme covers, the grid itself pulled to the centre, a real catalogue spread re-centred, and the projected sketch it started from.

Year one: nothing arrives finished. The mark is a ticker of its own construction: 24 letters swapped whole, split-flap style, between the current logo, Foundry Wilson and Frutiger. It never settles. A poster recorder keeps every move and plays the making back; lobby signage keeps its setting-out on the wall; motion studies and programme covers leave their working in.

Year one: nothing may be scaled to fit. The festival is set once, at full size, on one 2.7 m sheet: the mark 200 mm high, every film in screening order. Every format is a window of its true size cut from it: A5 to lobby banner. The website is the same sheet at 0.25 mm to the pixel, panned, never reflowed. Posters move but never resize; one vinyl band runs round the lobby, cut by its doors; the camera pans and cuts before anything resolves; 24 programme covers, no two alike, rebuild the sheet.

The present logo traced from the artwork and measured: every ink gap in cap heights, the tight pairs flagged (OW touching, RT at 0.012, VA overlapping), leading at 1.23 caps. The artwork is set in capitals; the reset and the eight layouts can be either case, and default to title case. Then the mark put to work as an institution: specimen sheet, ticket, pass, notice, amendment slip, label and letterhead, in three registers. The coincidence worth having: 24 letters, 24 cells, one letter to a cell. A two-state mark: GSFF opening into the full name, letter by letter, with the initials fixed. The colon route: Glasgow Short: as the institution, Film Festival as one of its products, with GS:FF as a timecode-like short form. A proper fitting tool: letters spaced on the white they carry, kerned where their shapes break the rhythm. And five routes drawn from the deck’s reference institutions: one letter redrawn a year, the mark as a timecode, the mark as its own data, the one-word mark, and the mark as a kit other people set. Then five from further afield: the mark as one second of film, the Wilson effect of Glasgow’s own type founder and astronomer, the city motto that has been getting shorter since 1631, the festival counted in cinema seats, and the mark’s own fourteen-letter alphabet. And four led by how they look: the plate, the enormous gesture against tiny precision, the mark that fills whatever box it is given, and the whole thing set in Wilson’s serif. And five taken from architecture, since the festival has to stand up in a city: the four words as four storeys on a datum, the mark coursed like sandstone, incised as a datestone, hung as a projecting blade, and framed from one structural member with its bill of materials. And the short form put on a clock: GS:FF is already the last field of a timecode, so the festival takes the frames field. Then the pair of faces the institution runs on: Frutiger or Wilson for the name, and Wilson or the narrow for everything else, judged on a poster head, a programme page, a notice, a ticket and a letterhead.

Year one: nothing arrives sharp. Focus is information — what is in it is what you are being asked to look at, and everything else is out of the plane. The still is degraded rather than restyled: taken out of focus, screened down to two or three tones, or reduced to two inks. The mark blurs by its own amount over it, a pane of frosted glass carries the record, and the record never leaves focus. One tool, both treatments, on any of the 152 films.

Year one: nothing is summarised. 152 films, 34 programmes and 40 screenings set whole, at four and a half point, until the list stops being a list and becomes a tone. The texture is only ever the record itself — never false text — and it has to read twice: a surface from across the room, a document in the hand. Density is the only colour, and the mark is where the texture stops: a hole cut in the record, or the only place the record is allowed to be. Then a second route with no image on it at all: forty thousand letters of programme set across the 24 cells, each letter taking the weight of the picture underneath it, so the still arrives out of the record — and displaced by a number belonging to its own film, so the programme is the algorithm that warps the picture.

The identity plan leaves colour open. A proposal: paper and black are permanent and information is always black; one ink is chosen for each edition, next to the rule, and carries the gesture; tints of it index the five days. Under Rule 03 the colour is printed once across the whole sheet, so 24 covers come out 24 colours. And a radical end of it: colour by index, three-plate overprinting off register, or one ink flooding everything. Then the simplest version of all: one colour to a day, a new scheme each year, and a ruler of film numbers down the outer edge of every page, marked in the colour of the day — the shut book shows the programme on its edge. And, since the scheme resets each year, a way of arriving at it rather than picking it: two algorithms that turn every code in the record into a hex, one nesting film inside screening inside day inside year, the other reading each from its own numbers.

Daniel’s own code poster, generated. One string: each film gives its code, then its title and director in bold with .by. between them, then everything the workbook knows about it — country, year, running time, programme, screening, date, time, venue, its codebook tags, its length band, the edition and the long code again. The paper takes the day’s colour, the mark sits behind the setting in it, and the rail carries the short mark, the total running time and the span. It sets itself to fill the sheet exactly, and the string can be copied out.

Two schemes for getting more than one thing out of one press run. One cut, two publications: one forme, one pass, one guillotine cut — everything after that is folding, which costs nothing and wastes nothing. The formats are not chosen: they are whatever the sheet divides into, so a programme and a catalogue fall out of an SRA1 as fractions of the paper. A5 and its offcuts: the family is trimmed to one spine height so the publications stand together on a shelf, and whatever comes off the edge of the sheet is already that height — an SRA1 four up gives 48 mm up the side, which is four bookmarks of 48 × 210, and three up gives 196 mm, which folds into a 98 × 210 second publication. What packs the sheet: fix the spine height and it works out which standard sizes fill a sheet exactly — an A3 across is A5 + DL + bookmark, 148 + 99 + 50 = 297, to the millimetre, two rows of them with nothing left over. All three count the sheets, the kilos and the waste, say whether the whole record fits in the pages you have made, and carry a print-node code the way the deck proposes.

Everything the demos set, as plain text to copy out: 152 films in 34 programmes across 40 screenings — one line to a screening, a programme, a film, or an appearance — a programme line runs its own code, then its films in code (P001 F024 F040 F082 …), with the option to break them onto their own lines. Choose which fields go in the line and what separates them, the order and the case, the days, whether it comes out as lines or one long run, and how many times it repeats. Copy it, or save it as a .txt, and set it by hand.

Number the films in the order they are shown — day, then screening, then down the programme — and the number stops being a position in this year's alphabet and becomes a time. Down the outer edge of every page runs the whole festival as a fixed scale, with this page's films marked on it, and no folio at the foot. The scale never changes, so a mark's height says the same thing on every page: flick the book and the marks fall. A page's films come out as one solid block, and anything sitting above it is a film shared with an earlier programme, so a repeat shows itself without being labelled. Numbered A to Z instead, the same 34 pages give scatter. The start number can be pushed up to see what a continuous nineteen-year series looks like at the size it prints.