Baskerville animation: enjoyable, but who’s it for?
Today I watched the short animated film about John Baskerville, showing as part of Birmingham’s Hello Digital Festival. That was this morning, and I’m still unsure what the point of it is.
The film was showing on a loop, and the first time around it was missing the narration track. Whether this was intentional I don’t know, but it helped to highlight my confusion: is this film supposed to be an arty animation or an interesting documentary? If the former, it definitely requires prior knowledge on the part of the viewer; but it is quite intriguing.
But if – as I suspect – the intention was to inform, then I feel that it widely missed its mark. There’s too little detail for it to be of interest to anyone with a passing knowledge of typography, but too technical for it to make sense to complete novices.
There is so little about Baskerville to be found in Birmingham, and sadly this film didn’t even show all of that. Where, for instance, was the reference to the letter from Benjamin Franklin? And everything the film did touch on was merely mentioned, not explained.
It does look great though, and I loved it until I realised it had ended: I thought I’d just been watching an introductory trailer, not the entire documentary (at which point I realised that it really had been exactly the same film but with a voiceover added).
But for all that it is nicely done, if short.
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