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SnowWhite and the Huntsman • Titles & Ravenna Typeface

Published: Aug 16, 2012

Snow White & the Huntsman – Titles by The Mill Visual Effects Studio

The Mill credits:
Creative Director – Henry Hobson & Andrew Proctor

Typeface Designer – Manija Emran

Executive Producer – Stephen Venning

Producer – Lee Buckley

Music – Florence + The Machine

We’re told the biggest challenge in developing the SnowWhite & the Huntsman film titles was to create striking movie level quality of images that frame and effectively draw focus to the key principle titles. Images and text needed to work together in perfect harmony to captivate the viewer and guide them through the titles content at the same time.

Snow White & the Huntsman – Titles by The Mill Visual Effects Studio

Snow White & the Huntsman – Titles from The Mill Visual Effects Studio on Vimeo.

 Every typeface exudes a personality. A good typeface evokes an emotion, creates an atmosphere, exudes a genre, a style or implies a period in time.

The typeface, Ravenna; The Evil Queen (the stepmother) • 
The design and exploration for the titles and the main film title at the beginning of the movie concluded in creating a custom typeface (& font*) for Snowwhite & the Huntsman. The intention to capture the classic feel of the films setting while at the same time boasting a contemporary and sharp look. Creative Director Henry Hobson developed the completely customized typeface. The new typeface was named Ravenna after a character in the film – the Evil Queen. It is bold and dramatic, yet subdued to match the multifaceted character and her intriguing steadfast ways.

“The brief was to get a feminine font with a hard edge. Having played around with existing typeface, the design team found that Bodoni had a really nice feel to it, a stylish vibe and some nice detail. But even then it was distinctly feminine.” Their solution was to use Bodini as the foundation for the typeface that would become Ravenna.


Bodini originated in Italy created by Gianbattista Bodini (1740 – 1813) of Parma and introduced around 1800. Considered as beautiful today as when created because of it’s clean cut relationship between thick and thin elements. It’s use of white space and being devoid of excentric typographic detail. A beautiful typeface intended for reading.

Snow White and the Huntsman – Typography • Ravenna by The Mill Visual Effects Studio

Snow White and the Huntsman – Typography from Submarine Channel on Vimeo.

The finished titles were a mix of live action footage, portions from the film itself were used for the background and stylized ‘shattering effect’ CGI animation. A high speed Phantom camera was used. Allowing the creative team to explore the textures and micro details of garments and  knights’ armor in incredible detail. Capturing the beautiful graphic explosions of the dark knights in action.

*font is the code used by a computer to display a Typeface that the human eye recognises as letters.