WORDS

The folks over at Everynone just released a new addition to their series of shorts in collaboration with NPR & WNYC’s Radiolab – an evocative interpretation of communication which explores the role that language plays in our perception and understanding of the world: WORDS.

As a “bonus video” to reflect Radiolab’s recent subject matter of the same title, Everynone composed an extremely heartfelt visual array…a menagerie of everyday snapshots reflecting the human condition, presented symbiotically through masterful editing and an empathetic score.  Each image runs beautifully into one another creating a warm lyricism that not only pays tribute to the minutia of our daily lives, but weaves together a story that represents our society as a whole, tangential only through our assigned definitions of each part.

Everynone was kind enough to elaborate on their process:

“Our friends at Radiolab were making a show about ‘words’, and they wanted us to make a companion video.  Upon hearing that the subject for the show would be ‘words’, we immediately thought of the big books, the dictionary and thesaurus.  From there, we decided that we’d make some sort of visualizations of these books.  Pretty early on, we knew it’d play quite like a game, you could call it a “game-film”.  Starting with “play”, we simultaneously created and connected the dots, back and forth between dictionary and thesaurus.

It took a good week to write the piece out, and about a month to shoot and edit.  There were a fair amount of changes along the way, but the entire piece existed, for the most part, on paper.  Of course, when working in a realm of “planned non-fiction”, there are surprises everywhere.  Every person in the piece is a non-actor.  We made lots of phone calls and pulled tons of strangers off the street to get the subjects and actions we wanted.

To keep the whole flow fresh, we played with the detail and branches of the word associations, and the transitions between words became our glue.

It was a new way to approach the filmmaking process, and it made the whole thing fun and exciting.  If you listen to Radiolab, you’ll find that sort of curiousity and positive energy is gushing, so it was a breeze for us to play with it.”

Lastly, as you all probably know by now, Radiolab is awesome.  Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich (and team) consistently create a beautiful musicality of scientific exploration, unique sound design, and affable storytelling – a program more lucid than most visual media, in my opinion – and their latest presentation doesn’t miss a beat.  It’s an exploration into the role that structured language plays into our perception of ourselves and the world around us.  Be sure to check out Radiolab’s Words following Everynone’s kickass supplement.

Credits:
Made by Everynone
Additional Photography: Julius Metoyer
Supervising Producer: Robert Krulwich
Associate Producer: Larry Cohen
Motion Graphics: Jeff Desom
Original Score: Keith Kenniff

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About the author

Matt Hunter Ross

/ matthunterross.com
2007 SCAD grad - MFA Broadcast Design & Motion Graphics.

7 Comments

_james

beautiful edits.

butlertotheb

Wow that is a great video

mintyfresh

great film, as well as super creative work. love that Radio Lab

glad this was featured, excellent stuff

Lyon

listen to Radiolab at work all the time. best podcast around. this is a cool visual riff on the latest episode. good job.

gunbrella

Each word was placed in my head with such care. I’ve listened to each Radiolab episode at least twice and somehow seeing this post felt like my worlds were colliding. A George divided against itself cannot stand!

RollingVandal

Amazing visual play on words, fantastic direction, and look as well. I’m a little sad that the editor wasn’t given a credit in the full credits you posted as I’m sure he had quite a lot to do with what was happening there, and there was a motion gfx credit, while I didn’t see a whole lot of that, perhaps I’m missing something though.

koruja

boring…

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