motion · 2024
Meridian
A documentary that begins before it begins.
Title sequence and motion identity for Meridian, a feature documentary about the last three mapmakers working entirely by hand in a world of satellite imaging.
The commission
Designing with constraint
The entire sequence was built from one source material: photographs of the mapmakers' hands at work — ruling lines in ink, erasing, re-ruling. We abstracted these into a motion language: ink diffusing through water, coastlines forming from accumulated pen strokes, contour lines tightening and releasing. No CGI terrain. No synthetic camera. Every motion has a physical analogue.
Typography as cartography
The title treatment emerged from a study of compass roses. The letterforms of MERIDIAN were drawn on a grid, each character connected to the next by a faint ruling line, as if the title itself had been surveyed into existence. We collaborated with lettering artist Cleo Marsh, who drew seventeen iterations of the capital M before we found the one that felt genuinely north-pointing.
Festival life
Meridian opened at Hot Docs 2024 and won Best Documentary at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Three different reviewers singled out the title sequence in their opening paragraphs. The sequence has since been licensed for use in a retrospective at the Barbican on the art of cartography.