We tend to experience buildings as static or slow-moving objects relative to our own points of view, but this simple work of creative adaptation turns an ordinary perspective into a dynamic animation.

The facade of the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway is wonderfully ornate, rich in architectural details with rows of hand-carved sculptures, all of which whizzes by in this fast-paced and selectively choreographed mini-film.

Spanish animator Ismael Sanz-Pena composed the piece from a single still image. But, per Colossal, the background recording of chants, cheers and drums “adds an extra element of vitality” through this “unique continuous motion animation.”

“The idea behind the film was to find the innate movement inherit in still forms,” says the animator, who also works on more conventional drawn animations. “Every sculpture has movement in it, and it is the task of the animator to discover it. It was through the process of editing my imagery that I discovered that a single image would suffice to create the animation. The film was made by zooming into the image and panning row by row while making sure that different architectural motives aligned in every increment. This also gave a structure to the film.”

New York City never sleeps, they say, and this animation shows just how active the city is by day and at night, combining elements of both in one film that represents “22 Trips to New York, 352 Hours of filming, $1,430 paid in Parking Fees, 9988 Miles Driven, and 232,000 Pictures Taken.” The result is a breathtaking architectural animation that becomes increasingly surreal as you watch.

“Traditional time-lapses are constrained by the idea that there is a single universal clock,” explains creator Julian Tryba. “In the spirit of Einstein’s relativity theory, layer-lapses assign distinct clocks to any number of objects or regions in a scene. Each of these clocks may start at any point in time, and tick at any rate. The result is a visual time dilation effect known as layer-lapse.”

The filmmaker quit his job a few years ago after the success of his Boston Layer-Lapse film and began focusing his next project on the Big Apple. To level things up, he began writing code to deal with the myriad more images this new piece would involve. “To create a layer-lapse effect, I am assigning a unique equation to hundreds of buildings simultaneously. For each frame, every building is calculating and deciding which time of day to reveal. One example of a script that yields a ‘look’ are the waves of day or night that move through some of the shots in this film.”

“To achieve the ‘look’ I can set parameters like the speed at which the wave moves across the screen, how rapidly each layer will switch from day to night or vice versa, and I’ll often use a random sinusoidal function to create a subtle oscillation inside the wave itself. Now I’ve probably lost half my audience but for those of you still reading, the final step is linking an action or a script to a piece of the music.” In the end, the work is a combination of mathematical and manual animation.

Whether intentionally retro, as in Stranger Things, or overtly futuristic, as in RoboCop, the role of typography in a movie goes well past the title, subtly but powerfully shaping the world viewers are invited to experience.

Dave Addey, author and creator of Typeset in the Future, is as meticulous as he is obsessed, analyzing appearances of type in film line by line, providing insights, context and speculative answers to various uses (as well as typo corrections).

It started with Eurostile Bold Extended, which has made appearances from Star Trek to Wall-E. Since then, he has written about typography in Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, and in anticipation of the sequel: Blade Runner.

With fonts you get a lot of context for free,” says Addey. “You’ve established the time frame for your movie in seconds without a lot of special effects or backstory.” It also tells you something about the world, like: when a single megacorp runs everything and its typeface is consequently found everywhere.

He watches films over and over again, taking notes then tracking down type, sometimes manually by searching through old books to find exact matches (in other cases: the typography is custom, making the process frustrating).

And type is just part of the equation: he looks at iconography and other design elements too, piecing together a larger picture of the various strategies in play and how they relate to the core narrative.

By zooming in on this one aspect of films, he often traces connections that are easy to miss, like: a newspaper being held by the lead character in Blade Runner later appearing as the liner for a drawer. For fans of sci-fi and design, his blog will take you deeper into films than you realized you could go — it is well worth checking out.

More about the project: “This site is dedicated to typography and iconography as it appears in sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV shows. It’s inspired by the Typeset In The Future trope I added to TV Tropes. (If you know of more good sci-fi font examples, please do add them to that page.)”

Much of the magic of the Star Wars films derives from the fantastic landscapes and exotic built environments that serve as backdrops for its intergalactic tales of empires and rebellions. But when world-makers like George Lucas create these places, they often draw on real architects and architecture for inspiration, including the last and largest work of starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Located north of San Francisco, the Marin County Civic Center consists of a massive rotunda housing a public library, offset by a strong vertical spire and long Hall of Justice (a classic Wright move to emphasize and juxtapose both horizontals and verticals). These same features can be found in the heart of Naboo, a Mid Rim world (near the Outer Rim Territories) featured across a series of Star Wars films.

As with their cinematic counterparts, Wright’s structures for Marin were designed to relate to the landscape – curved blue roofs pick up on the tones of the sky above while beige/pink walls tie into the earthen surroundings. Arched supports and the voids they create at different scales are also immediately recognizable as similar between the original Terrestrial architecture and its echos in Star Wars scenes.

For Wright as well as Lucas, there is an underlying idea at work in the design: a combining of grandeur worthy of civic architecture but also an aspiration toward something democratic, beautiful but accessible. The settings are also similar: complex and lush landscapes, fitting a similar vision found in both the architect’s and filmmaker’s works: a focus on working architecture into natural settings rather than envisioning dense cities. Lucas has directly acknowledged a debt to Wright for inspiring the architecture found in the Star Wars franchise, but has yet to announce whether he will be working on a sequel story: some of us are still waiting on Starchitecture Wars.

All of the stereotypes associated with the architectural profession and its stars, real and exaggerated, are about to be revealed in an hour-and-a-half movie starring Parker Posey (wife), Eric McCormack (husband), John Carroll Lynch (builder) and James Frain (architect).

Directed by Jonathan Parker, the The Architect‘s trailer gives you a taste of what is to come: “Often the opinion of the client must be disregarded for his own good,” says starchitect Miles Moss (Frain). “Less is only more when more is no good” (a satirical nod to Mies van der Rohe).

The story revolves around a couple that buy a tear-down house and decide to build from scratch. They spot a dwelling they like and hunt down the architect to design their dream home. It quickly becomes clear, however, that their dreams will be replaced by those of the architect, or at best: rendered in concrete, glass and steel. The wife (Posey) may also be having second thoughts about her choice of partner. Architects and architecture often take a back seat to the main story in films (see: Sleepless in Seattle), but in this picture, for better or worse, the profession is the center of attention.

As the story progresses, the architect’s masterful creation meets resistance, his impractical semi-circular spaces making for a tough sell (at least to the husband). “I don’t know why people hire architects, and then tell them what to do,” Moss wonders aloud, frustrated with his clients. Like this one, many of his lines clearly refer to quotes from famous architects both contemporary (e.g. Frank Gehry) and historical (e.g. Le Corbusier).

“These are the sleeping spaces” says the architect, pointing at the plan (“You mean bedrooms?” the husband replies) — “You could call them that” he admits, his voice dripping with superiority (architects are somewhat notorious for giving things overly-fancy names). The movie hits on movements from Modernism through Deconstructivism, wrapping them in the comedic story of a troubled couple. Love it or hate it, relate or disagree, this is a must-watch movie for fans as well as critics of the profession.