The Maker dolls made by Amanda Louise Spayd are so mysterious and whimsical that we had to build a world befitting these strange little creatures.

Now we actually developed the full lore of The Makers in a book called The Magnum Opus, which we released after the short film. But for the short, we only had the 5-minute runtime to set up and sell this enchanted world.

The Maker workshop had to look as old as time itself. But beyond the rustic finish and mechanical trinkets, we wanted The Makers to have their own written language allowing them to pass down knowledge from one Maker to the next.

We couldn’t really design a new language from scratch, but designer Brett Bimson who worked on the film came up with a clever solution.

Side note on Brett, he’s an extraordinary creative who’s been involved in all our projects from the beginning.

Anyway, he designed a very cool font where he repurposed common symbols you’d find in sheet music to look similar to letters you’d find in the English alphabet.

So whenever we needed text to appear in the film, we’d just write it using our special font.

In some cases, we wrote real words, like the passage from Buddha on the blackboard, or the text on the hourglass, or diagrams on the wall – we’ll do another video on what they say.

But other times, to get the job done quickly we just copy and pasted Latin text, like for the passages in the book’s internal pages. Though there are some easter eggs in there which we’ll also cover in another video.

And I personally hand-wrote every word on the draws along the back wall. But it’s pretty much gibberish.