Slant

Slant is a dark comedy-thriller set during Christmas 1999 in Melbourne Australia. In this feature film we follow a career crazed journalist as he dredges up the sordid secrets of an infamous socialite after her mysterious disappearance.

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The film was created and conceived by Melbourne based writer Michael Nikou and director James Vinson, who approached us in late 2020 to join the team as their title designer. In our opening meetings, we discussed how the film’s setting, subjects, and satirical aesthetics were all driven by a nostalgic reimagining of 1990s pulp underscored by contemporary topics of fake news and mass perception.

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Through numerous conversations and workshops with director James Vinson, the title sequence was conceived as a single long take through a labyrinthine canyon of newspaper clippings that mysteriously soak through with blood as the shot plays out. As the sequence progresses, the camera cranes out of the canyon to reveal that the walls we have been surrounded by are the letters of the film’s title.

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In the world of Slant, the characters live in an environment defined by the rumours and conspiracies spread about them, and we wanted the setting that introduces the cast to embody a landscape literally made of stories. The low angle of the camera aims to give the clippings a monumental scale, whilst the shallow depth of field also tries to evoke a sense of the miniature sets of 80s/90s titles.

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For the visual design of the newpaper clippings, we began by collecting a large volume of archival articles from various Australian papers dating to near 1999. From these, we extracted key headlines, adverts, and famous photographs contemporaneous to the fictional events that take place during Slant. The articles themselves are all created as pieces from ‘The Melbourne Chronicle’ - the fictional news agency that Slant’s protagonist reports for. These articles were then used as textures for the hundreds of pages that texture the walls of the title sequence’s environment.

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For more information, including session times across Australia, visit Slant's website here: https://www.slant-movie.com/ 

TEAM

Title Sequence and VFX Designer

Nathan Su​