Tales from the Lodge

Picnic’s creative director and founder Liam O'Connor invited me to concept and design the bespoke typeface used for the opening sequence of the British comedy horror Tales from the Lodge directed by Abigail Blackmore.

The movie tells the story of a group a friends gathering at a lodge to commemorate their friend who drowned in a lake nearby 3 years ago. They tell each other scary stories for old time sake but suddenly find themselves in one.

After a bit of exploration, referencing some classic horror typography, we decided to go down a rawer look for the type and explore the idea of wood carving. Like if someone had carved names in a tree trunk. Each names and titles were carefully drawn by hand, refined and vectorized in Adobe Illustrator then brought to After Effects to be slightly animated.

The second role I had the chance to be involved in this project was the animation of the illustrations and compositing of the sequence. All the illustrations were done by Picnic’s team but then handed over to me for making them move and then putting everything together. Color grading and final tweaks were done by Liam and team.