Hollywoodland

COMING TO CALIFORNIA: HISTORY GALLERY SECTION 08

The growth of Southern California's economy in the 1920s and 30s was due in no small part to the establishment of Hollywood as the center of domestic film production. This section tells the story of that boom, and allows visitors themselves to experiment with costume design, animation, and foley sound in the CREATIVE HOLLYWOOD area.

Recalling the Art Deco styling of the grand movie house theaters of the time, headers for this section are set in Binner.

Text captions for a media piece on the entry wall produced by Gabriel Lamb were designed in the style of silent movie era title cards. The corner graphic flourishes are authentic to the period, with typesetting in a hand-distressed version of Morris Fuller Benton's Cromwell.

This media installation shows films that were shot in California, depicting different archetypal locations. The title is rendered as a custom-built, vintage clapperboard. Design work on this area was completed with support from Auburn Leigh.

I had access to a wide variety of vintage print ephemera references in order to design these re-creations. All typefaces are accurate to the period, sourced from the 1923 American Type Founder's specimen book and the Mergenthaler Linotype catalog from the mid-1930s.

CREATIVE HOLLYWOOD is a subsection of sorts, an interactive area where visitors can experiment and play with certain aspects of filmmaking. We wanted people to feel that they truly had stepped "behind the scenes," and as such the environment has the look and feel of a studio lot warehouse. Titles have been stenciled with spray paint onto planks, suggesting crates.

The COSTUME DESIGN STUDIO invites visitors to draw their own fashions by tracing from transparencies. The area resembles an actual office, with cork boards hosting photographs of noted characters from the 1920s–1940s. The ANIMATION STUDIO allows for hand-placed keyframes that are digitally recorded and they played in sequence to simulate the hand animation process. San Francisco illustrator Michael Jeter provided the characters for this activity.

Four sections of the history gallery contain large format scrapbooks which are similar to my Gold Rush Miner Journals. Although this Hollywood book was designed by Tom Klump at inktankdesign, I contributed the title lockup based on my typographic treatment for the section. Binding and finishing by The Key.