With the recent showings of “Kill Bill: Vol. 1″ and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2″ on basic cable — horribly cut up, but on television nonetheless — I am reminded of how “typographically rich” these films are. Being a designer, I couldn’t help but notice the almost humorously varying number of fonts used for the credits, subtitles and chapter titles. Most movies find one or two really sharp looking typefaces and stick with them for everything, from opening titles to closing credits. But not Quentin Tarantino. My best guess is that the wacky inconsistancy is yet another tribute to the grindhouse films — notoriously low budget, including title sequences — that “Kill Bill” is meant to emulate. But who knows…
So what fonts do the movies feature? That’s what the bulk of this entry is about. A little about how I came about this information.
If one watches the end credits of both films, one will notice that the titles and credits are, um, credited to Pacific Title, a company that has been doing movie titles pretty much since movies had titles. They are involved in a large number of Hollywood productions every year, and they seem to do good work. But they were very unhelpful when I contacted them in an attempt to get a list of the fonts used in “Kill Bill.” So unhelpful, in fact, that they didn’t respond to several emails or even a telophone message. So what was I to do? The only thing I could do: search the Interweb for someone who’d done all the hard work already. I found a few items, mostly people just commenting on how, gosh, there were a bunch of different fonts in that movie. The most helpful items were forum threads on Web sites devoted to fonts and font information.
(I split this entry up into multiple pages since there are 20+ images on it. You can move back and forth by using the links at the bottom of each page.)
That WhatTheFont site is stupidly cool. I’ve used Identifont (http://www.identifont.com/) before to identify unknown typefaces, but it only works if you have more characters to work with. If you can get more screen shots that use those same typefaces, you *might* be able to identify it with Identifont. That will certainly be tricky with some of the screen grabs that only have a few characters (though I know I’ve seen the characters in that “Vol. 2″ screenshot before — I’ll have to look in my collection here).
“Our feature presentation” is about as simple as they come: Helvetica bold.
I’m fairly sure that “a film by Quentin Tarantino” is Gadget, although they seem to have modified the “Q” slightly.
That’s about all I have time for tonight.
That Vol. 2 looks a lot like Franklin Gothic Heavy with a modified 2 (as I can’t find that two in any typeface I have on my desktop). That’s about as close as I got, as the rest of my sans typefaces I have here have a wider inner circle in the “o”, have a round period, or have a perfectly symetrical (sp?) “V”, and the Franklin “V” is weighted a bit on the left more. Obviously the font size is different per character, but it looks pretty dang close to me.
The script typeface looks like Coronet, based on playing with Identifont’s new feature where you can tell it what characters you have to work with.
I couldn’t figure out the serif typeface for the life of me, however.
This has been fun :-)
i’m jealous of your font knowledge.
The font in “Our feature presentation” closely resembles Helvetica, but look at the “R” and “S” — they don’t match a bit.