The Night Circus
Design Brief: Create style frames for a title sequence for The Night Circus—a story about magicians in a dark, magical circus.
Concept: Life as a Cuckoo Clock
Throughout The Night Circus, a magical cuckoo clock appears as a theme. I’ve therefore used a clock as my main design theme by depicting the people and elements within The Night Circus as cuckoo clock characters.
Styleframes.
Motion Test.
Design Development.
Why this font? I based the font choice on Victorian posters to evoke the time period of The Night Circus. This highly angular font calls to the geometric shapes within the piece.
Why this palette? The circus in the story is known for only using black and white for all costumes, circus tents, pamphlets, and tickets. The avid circus-goers within the story always wear red. I therefore based my color palette on what a night at the circus would look like.
I wanted the clock to feel more magical than functional, so I started by redesigning the gears. I discovered David C. Roy’s kinetic sculptures, which portrayed the whimsical, magical aesthetic I needed for the clock gears. The sculptures also worked well with the original cover art for The Night Circus. I pulled type inspiration from Victorian posters.
I based my sketches for the characters and main elements of the sequence off of the kinetic sculpture gears to find a cohesive aesthetic.
The Night Circus is a book about a magical circus. A magical cuckoo clock is always stationed at the circus’ entrance. Many of the characters’ fates are magically determined by the circus itself, so I’ve turned the characters and main elements of the story into mechanically controlled cuckoo clock characters. Through this my design, I wanted to start with the clock face and travel into the clock—to make the clock much more of the focus.