Duskline needed a title sequence for a debut feature with a festival deadline and almost no post-production budget left to spend on it. The director wanted type that felt handmade without slipping into pastiche, something closer to a title card cut by hand than a template pulled from stock motion libraries.

We shot sixteen millimetre film of ink dispersing in water, then hand-set every title card against the footage frame by frame rather than animating type on top of it digitally. The process took three times longer than a standard build, but the grain and the drift could not be faked convincingly.

Good titles are invisible. You only notice the ones that are wrong.

The typeface carried into every piece of marketing that followed: posters, the teaser cut, festival programme listings and the eventual home release. Duskline’s producer told us afterwards that critics mentioned the titles by name in four separate reviews, which almost never happens for a sequence under two minutes long.

The sequence went on to screen at three genre festivals as a standalone entry in short-form craft categories, which was never the brief but became the nicest surprise of the project. Duskline has since brought us back for two more features, both still in production, both under close wraps for now.