Typographic Expression Through Film
Anna Streeter

For this project I attempted to typographically represent the final speech from Charlie Chaplain’s film, The Great Dictator. The tone of the film is satirical and borders on controversial being that itis a comedic rebuttal of sorts to the ideologies of Hitler at the time. Chaplain does this by playing on the uncanny likeness between the dictator in the film (Hynkel or Hitler) and Chaplain’s well known character, The Tramp. Chaplains character gives a speech in the shoes of the dictator in which he makes a plea to humanity. To return to it.For this project I decided to play on the idea of formation. Documentary photography from areas run by dictatorships often depicts the military as it is often used as a representation and show of power. So using formation as a vehicle for this uplifting and chain breaking speech seemed like a fitting parallel to Chaplian’s character standing in the shoes of this tyrannical dictator.Using inspiration from the poster we made in the second exercise, I wanted to bring that looming presence of the text in the sky into the real world. By utilizing Photoshop and Aero I was able to create a similar experience where one could walk under the text, thus being forced to lift their heads, similar to the sentiments of the speech, “Look up!”