Please note that in 2016 Jonathan Puckey founded interactive design studio Puckey. Please visit puckey.studio for up to date work.

Killing Time







Ever since I designed the HSL Poster in 2003, which was basically one very long image of a train trip between two cities, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of transforming time based media to print.

This fascination lead to Killing Time; an interpretation of a movie as a book.


Maybe conversion is a better word, since the only manual part of the book is the binding.



I used the dialog to define the parts of the movie that I wanted to focus on.

The images are constructed by taking the subtitles of the movie and using their timing and length to define the points of interest in the movie.

I divided the frames of the movie into a grid of 19 horizontal and 10 vertical devisions.

Time runs through the grid horizontally, starting at the top and going down.

When there is no dialog, every subsequent block is 1 second (25 frames) apart.

When a subtitle appears, time is slowed down and every subsequent block is 1 frame apart for the amount of blocks determined by the amount of characters in the subtitle devided by two.

The vertical placement of the images in the book is determined by the position in the movie.