Grey City
Ashley Seung Hyun Ahn
“Grey City” is a digital single album of an one-woman band called “Ash.” The main theme of this album is “trilingual.” I made the song and wrote the lyrics in three different languages (Korean, English, and Japanese) that I speak. The song is about this virtual city called “Grey City,” that stands in between of everything.
As someone who has grown up in different cultures, sometimes, I feel like I do not belong anywhere. A lot of things in the world are divided in black and white, but a lot of times, I feel like I’m standing in the middle rather than on one side. The color grey, a color that is in between black and white, is a metaphor of this in-between status.
Based on the idea of trilingualism, I designed a universal typeface in Korean, Japanese, and English. All the letters from all three languages are composed of same elements. Only few restricted components such as straight lines, half circles, and quarter circles were used to form the letters, so they would look consistent as a font even though they are in different languages. In the end, I created a typographic music video that goes along with the song, using this typeface.
All the animations in the video are in stop motion, so it could be perceived more as a typographic piece rather than a motion graphic piece.