Life Of Pi- Typography Communication

Life of Pi is an American survival drama film by Director Ang Lee. The storyline revolves around an Indian man named “Pi” Patel, telling a novelist about his life story, and how at 16 he survives a shipwreck in which his family dies.

Primary purpose of this exploration is making a new connection between the movie and typography. The opportunity to explore the relationship between the visuals of the film and the words in the scene.

The poster is intended to conceptually represent the scene where Pi tells his story in the hospital. He is brought into custody, given food, and questioned for some time by two officials from the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry of Transport. The officials’ transcript of the conversation reveals that they do not believe Pi’s story in its entirety, and they tell him so. Initially Pi sticks to his story, but then he offers them another, somewhat similar story in which he shares the lifeboat with a crew member of the sunken ship, his own mother, and a foul-tempered French cook who eventually kills both Pi’s mother and the crewman.

I utilized all the text in this scene as geometric color blocks to create overlapping and rotating motion to the eye in the middle of the poster. I used black and red blocks as a gloomy keynote, and I also used different hues of red and black to show the rhythm of the text. I played around with the space and size, but also made sure that all of the text is legible to read. This project challenged the way I view type: rather than include any actual images, I wanted to demonstrate how typefaces can carry emotion of their own. In order to create visual hierarchy in the poster, I placed an eye in the middle and put the title inside of it. The way I organized the type was meant to give a sense of spinning out of control, and all of the combination of typeface and geometric forms lead to Pi’s sad and dark memories.