The Beatles: Get Back documentary
Decimal Medium is used to introduce main subjects.
The 3-part docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, directed by Peter Jackson, takes viewers back in time to a pivotal point in the history of the titular band. As the series is mostly made up of 60+ hours of restored footage from 1969, the type system employed by Julian Hills mostly reflects that.
Hills selected popular typefaces of the era, like Univers, Futura Condensed, Venus Extended and ITC Avant Garde Gothic, and mixed them with a few new typefaces like Decimal from Hoefler & Co and Corbert Wide from The Northern Block. The result is a sans bananza, mixing new styles and old, quiet voices and loud, much like the documentary’s mop top subjects.
Univers 55 Roman is used for titles and subtitles.
Avant Garde Gothic Medium Italic is used for song titles, paired with Decimal Medium for the names of the song writers.
On a calendar of 1969 used to frame the timeline, information is typeset in Venus Extended and Futura Condensed.
ITC Avant Garde Gothic Bold and Univers 63 Bold Extended are used in additional situating text.
Corbert Wide Black is used sparingly for tertiary titles.
2 Comments on “The Beatles: Get Back documentary”
Thanks, Colin!
Matthijs wonders if the calendar is a contemporary creation made for the documentary, or if it’s an original from the 1960s. This weight of Venus was named breit dreiviertelfett (literally “wide three quarters bold”) in German, and at least the size of the metal version shown in the specimen I’m looking at had numerals with horizontal terminals – like in the calendar, but unlike in Scangraphic’s Venus SB Bold Extended. Venusian Bold Extended, a digitization by Wooden Type Fonts from 2018, is a better match in that regard, but suffers from poor spacing and some botched glyphs, see e.g. the flat-tire S or U – I hope the production designer didn’t bother to fix that mess. I’m not aware of a digital version that matches the type on the calendar in all details, so it could be originally vintage indeed.
Just wanted to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! This is absolutely awesome. Phe