Kiki’s Delivery Service

The Official Screenplay

2022 | COMD-404


A re-interpretation of traditional screenplays. Using a portion of Kiki’s Delivery Service’s official screenplay, this text uses expressive and dynamic typography accompanied by small illustrations to visualize its meaning and intentions.

In some ways, traditional screenplays can look quite flat. It lacks elements such as emphasis, and sometimes has large blocks of descriptive text that, to a regular person, may look a bit tiring to read. To make it more approachable and digestable as simply reading material, the text was made to look like a children’s book- or more precisely, like a kid has drawn on the book. This particular concept was used to visualize and emphasize key elements of the screenplay such as the dialogue, sound effects, movements, as well as the emotions and personalities of each character.

My process for this design was to mimick aspects of the movie that would usually be described and expressing that through dynamic typography.

For the most part, the format of this screenplay is relatively similar to that of traditional screenplays. Elements such as the dialogue, scene headings, and sound effects were separated to create organization between elements. To add more separation, colours and different typefaces were used and a legend was made to ensure a clear structure despite the unpredictable typography and illustration.

Words for sounds effects were emphasized by changing the weight, point size and spacing of the typeface. All the onomatopioeas used for the sound were more consistent in their look, as most of the sounds felt best represented through a taller typeface as they were sharp-sounding or made a character jump.

To showcase more physical motions, certain actions and movements such as wind, tugging, shouting, falling was represented through either expressive type of small illustrations. This was done to create a more vivid picture for what was happening.

To emulate a characters, emotions, tone of voice, or loudness, parts of the dialogue were lengthened, widened, shortened or manipulated in some  way to help others understand what that character sounded like or how they felt in that particular moment.