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Interesting

Voice Cameos of James Cameron

Director James Cameron can often be heard making off-screen voice cameos in his movies.

In the The Terminator (1984), some have speculated that he voices the guy who leaves an answerphone message for Sarah Connor, cancelling their date for the evening.

But although it could be him putting on an accent, it seems more likely he is the motel receptionist later in the film who checks Sarah and Kyle Reese in as they flee the killer cyborg.

At a Terminator promotional event in 1991, Cameron admitted that he provided some of the sounds for the Alien Queen in Aliens (1986), dubbing them at his house near Pinewood Studios.

Near the beginning of The Abyss (1989), he began a tradition of voicing a pilot, as we can hear him ask for clearence to land a helicopter on the Benthic Explorer ship as he drops off the Navy SEAL team.

In Terminator 2 (1991) he went back to voicing villains, providing the screams of the T-1000 as it interacted with molten steel towards the end of the film.

With True Lies (1994), he was back to voicing pilots, as one of the Marine Harrier pilots who fires upon the terrorist convoy on the Overseas Highway bridge.

With Titanic (1997), his voice cameo is easily missed as a faint voice on deck asking a fellow passenger about ‘talk of an iceberg’. (Unusually, he also makes couple of visual cameos in the background of two scenes)

Avatar (2009) saw him return to pilot mode as he can be heard on the radio as Quaritch’s forces begin their attack on Hometree.

I’m guessing he finds voice cameos easier than making a distracting visual appearence and that it’s easier to dub in some dialogue during post-production.

> More on James Cameron at Wikipedia
> T2 fan event in 1991

Categories
Interesting Posters

Trajan: The Movie Font

Why do so many movie posters use the Trajan font?

Designed by Carol Twombly for Adobe in 1989, the old style serif typface quickly found its way into pop culture.

It is was used on the bestselling novels of John Grisham, became the official font of various universities around the world (including Bologna, Kansas and Lausanne) and the Assassin’s Creed game franchise.

Politicians love it too, with figures such as Chris Dodd, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney and even Barack Obama using it in past campaigns.

But it became hugely popular with movie poster designers, as this video by Kirby Ferguson demonstrates.Posters which feature the font include Titanic (1997), Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and more recently This Is It (2009).

But check out this slideshow to get some idea of how ubiquitous it has become:

The easy answer as to its success is that it has been used in popular movies, but I think there is a deeper reason as to why it became so popular.

Maybe the old-style classiness projects an image of authority, which might also explain why politicians love it.

This is actually important for upscale mainstream films such as Titanic which are looking for that veneer of class to distinguish themselves from rival fare at the multiplex.

In a sense the font has come to represent a hybrid of commercial success and cultural importance, even if the films using it have neither.

Maybe after the phenomenon of Titanic, it spread like a virus amongst movie marketing departments because they wanted to emulate that elusive holy grail of box office dollars and worthy prestige.

> Find out more about Trajan at Wikipedia
> IMP Awards
> Movie Poster Addict