The Baskerville Project

Stranger –Beneath this Cone in unconsecrated ground / A friend to the liberties of mankind directed his body to be inhum’d / May the example contribute to emancipate thy mind / From the idle fears of superstition / And the wicked arts of Priesthood.

Scene animated by Sophie O'Leary Smith & Laura Rayner.

Text animated over a dark brown background, light/weightless and beautiful characters, like fire flies sparkling and glowing on screen to form the Epitaph above.

Text then cuts to the Baskerville logo with coloured dragon identity.

A Baskerville Project Production.

Story Board

[00.26.9]

Birmingham is the UK’s premier typographic city. Home to John Baskerville: writing master, stone-carver, type-founder, printer, and creator of ‘Baskerville’ the world’s most well-known and enduring typeface.

Birmingham’s claim to typographic fame doesn’t simply lie with the bones of Baskerville. For three centuries the spirit of this typographic mastermind survives today in one of our most widely used and historically important typefaces.

Camera pans across a contemporary mapped landscape of the city.

Montage images (from architectual/historical photography and illustration) create letterforms and symbols, which rise up out of the mapped landscape as the camera moves towards the city centre.

Using masks to reveal older maps of the city, the camera will move through 4 centuries, back to Baskerville's C18th, showing the phisical changes in the landscape through maps and architectual icons of the city.

The montages represent values specific to each century and are constructed from imagery from each period.

[00:27.0]

A local hero with a worldwide reputation who made 18th centuryBirmingham a city without typographic equal, changing the course oftype design, and emancipated printers the world over.

Camera pans in to show a the portrait of John Baskerville.

Camera zooms in on the portrait of John Baskerville showing the layers of varnish being removed to reveal vibrant colours of red, gold and green on his clothes.

[00:13.1]

A flamboyant man with a colourful character.

Baskerville was an unrelenting ‘doer’ he was an inspired businessman and arch-nonconformist who excelled in a city populated by political, religious and industrial dissenters.

A confirmed atheist who flouted convention, he lived with his lover, dressed like a peacock, and conducted his life – and death - as if it were a performance.

John Baskerville was a maverick and an adventurer who followed any avenue, however bizarre, which promised fame, fortune or infamy.

Camera pans back to reveal Baskerville riding in his carriage.

Montage animation taken from paintings and illustrations of the period. Treatment influenced by Japaning technique.

Move to wide angle shot to show the carriage from the front elevation of Easy Hill.

Pulls back again to show the lush landscape.

Camera pulls back further to reveal that the scene is a japanned panel in the carriage.

Camera move across and zooms into another japanned panel depicting a scene of Baskerville preparing to carve the Baskerville Slate.

[N.B. According to William Hutton, John Baskerville rode about in a japanned carriage “each panel of which was a distinct picture, so that his carriage might be considered the pattern card of his trade.” ]

Example of Visual Treatment.

Story Board

[00:35.1]

Baskerville started his work designing headstones and teaching writing at a local school. But Baskerville wanted to be rich and so started a japanning business – a process for covering decorated metals with varnish – by which he earned an early fortune.

Scene animated by Ben Waddington.

Camera pans across the Baskerville Slate to show the slate writing itself.

Story Board

[00:24.9]

Zoom into a Baskerville character on the Slate and then out to a wide shot that shows the Slate detail in a compartment of a Type Drawer.

He not only designed a typeface, he also experimented with casting and setting type, improved the consturction of the printing-press, developed a new kind of paper and refined the quality of printing inks.

Baskerville’s unique purple-black ink used soot from glass-pinchers’ lamps; his paper’s distinctive glaze came from ‘hot pressing’ – a process probably taken from a technique used in japanning; and his improvements to the printing press made his work more accurate and consistent more precise and perfect than any printed work previously produced.

Baskerville was a respected figure amongst a coterie of experimenters who made up Birmingham’s Luna Society: Boulton, Darwin, Murdoch, Priestley, Small, Watt and Wedgewood. A self-taught man who combined a passion for knowledge with a quest for perfection Baskerville had the ability to achieve anything to which he set his mind.

Split screen composition taking the form of a Type Drawer.

Camera panns across the type drawer showing different scenes acted out using live action footage in each compartment.

Compartments show contemporary key events and people: Birmingham inventions being discovered by the lunar society: oxygen, steam engine, gas lighting, mint, fizzy water, primary colours, digitalis.

Images appear faster and faster to suggest increase in industry and that there were a lot of Birmingham innovations.

Visual narrative demontrates Baskerville lent cash to Boulton and Watt to start all this up!

Include examples of Baskerville letterforms being drawn and metal type.

Example of Visual Treatment.

Story Board

[00:59.2]

Camera Zooms in on a compartment which shows an animateion of the lowercase letter 'g'.

Scene fades into a crisp vectorised lowercase letter 'g'.

[00:11.1]

All typefaces have spot characters, which make them different from others; Baskerville is no different, for example

• the tail on the lowercase g is open

• whilst the uppercase Q has a swash-like tail

• whilst the uppercase A has a high crossbar and pointed apex

• take a look at the uppercase C and you will notice serifs on both the top and bottom

• and neither the upper- or lowercase W has a middle stroke

• the uppercase J sits well below baseline and most identifiable of all the characters is Baskerville’s calligraphic J

Scene animated by SMILE.

Clean Graphic styling taken from Branded colour pallet to communicate the construction and differences between letterforms.

Story Board

[00:55.7]

It’s 250 years since Baskerville’s typeface was first meticulously printed in a series of remarkable publications that included the groundbreaking Virgil and the Cambridge Bible, whose superlative quality placed John Baskerville amongst the world’s greatest typographers.

His use of type was exemplary; his pressmanship remarkable; and his page-layout revolutionary in its simplicity.

It was a defining moment in typography, ridding it of the irrelevant decoration beloved of Baskerville’s contemporaries.

Baskerville’s typeface spawned imitators across Europe, his layouts were copied around the world and his pressmanship set new standards for printers everywhere.

Scene animated by David Sheppard.

Graphic illustrations to showing applications of Baskerville.

The treatment of the film visually moves from a dirty deconstructed look to a crisp elegant and clear aesthetic.

Textual and tacktile feel to animation, you can "touch the sticky purple ink".

Story Board

[00:48.0]

Baskerville’s French connection persisted with the typeface inspiring the work of the Revolution.

Based on a series of Cartoons drawn by Alex Hughes.

Scene animated by Giuseppa Barresi and David Jones.

Montage animation taken from paintings and illustrations of the period.

Pan across image of Baskerville's coffin up into the "Cone".

Cut to scene with Illustration of Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais, show an exchange of money for the punches, then the works of Voltair being printed.

Cut to classic images of the French revolution. Eugène Delacroix's Liberty and the People.

Reference Images

[00:19.2]

John Baskerville spent a fortune in opulence and a lifetime ofgenius in carrying to perfection the greatest of all human inventions.His typographic experiments put him years ahead of his time and he didmuch to progress the industry of his day.

Following the French Revolution Baskerville’s punches were passed around various French typefoundries until they found their way to Deberny & Peignot. Almost 150 years later, Stephenson Blake, Sheffield, started a Baskerville revival, triggering the release of new Baskerville fonts by almost every type manufacturer in the world thereafter, thus making it one of the most enduring and popular typefaces ever known.

Scene animated by Ruth Spencer & Steve Chamberlain.

Stop frame animation using still photography of Spencer's typographic installation in Birmingham Central library.

Image from the French Revolution is placed in shot, scrumpled up and then unfolded to a red arrow. The arrow is animated moving throughout the building.

Animation follows the physical journey of the type from the ground floor to the top of the building.

At set points the stop-frame animation is interpupted by live action film, detailing on the key Type Foundry logos. Scenes showing feet and people moving around focused on a printed sign with the logo in the centre, at key stages of the journey.

Logos to include: Stephenson Blake, Fry, Monotype, ATF, Linotype, ITC, Deberny & Peignot, Intertype, Mouldtype, Stemple, Enschede, URW, and Letraset.

ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT: CGI showing an old fashioned globe spinning on its axis.

Arrows circle the globe and detail on the Type foundries logos.

[00:43.5]

Unlike anyone else before or since, John Baskerville was the complete typographer: a man who had something individual to say, and the courage to say it, and to say it persistently and by doing so he gave the world one of the most useful, beautiful and long-lived typefaces.

Multi-screen composition showing stop-frame animations of examples of Baskerville in use today from contributions taken through the website, and animations of Baskerville letterforms being drawn etc.

The animation will be interupted by live action footage of the key contributors to the project holding up examples of Baskerville connected to themselves.

[00:17.4]

As in Opening Scene: Text animated over a dark brown background, light/weightless andbeautiful characters, like fire flies sparkling and glowing on screen.

Funders and Contributors Logos.

Storyboard

[00:27.0]