Halfway through making his film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s first years in New York, director Kevin Macdonald received an unexpected treasure trove. He was sent hours of never-before-heard phone calls that Lennon and Ono recorded in the early 1970s – the couple assumed their calls were being bugged by the US authorities and wanted their own record of what had been said. The incredibly intimate recordings feature conversations with friends, journalists, Lennon’s manager, and activists like AJ Weberman, who was involved in a bizarre plan to raid Bob Dylan’s bins, for which Ono demands he apologise. Macdonald first listened to them on a long train journey and realised they should play a central role in his documentary. “They were this little window into their private life,” he says. “Usually you hear them when they’re being interviewed and they’re prepared, and presenting an image of themselves. This is just them chatting on the phone.” Through the calls, even major fans learn far more about the couple, Macdonald says, through “the tone of voice, the turn of phrase and the wit.” But given the phone calls make up around 15 minutes of screen time in the final film, this presented an unusual design challenge. “Of all the films that I’ve ever done, this is definitely the most graphics dependent,” Macdonald says. “The graphics are a major part of what the film is.” Planning Unit’s phone call graphics for One to One: John & Yoko. Courtesy of Plan B/KM Courtesy of Plan B/KM Films and Mercury Studios. Macdonald was already working with London-based Planning Unit on the film – the studio had previously designed for his 2018 Whitney Houston documentary, Whitney, and his 2021 Guantanamo Bay legal drama, The Mauritanian. To focus viewers on the content of the calls, Macdonald knew he wanted them to be animated type, and he worked closely with Planning Unit co-founder Jeff Knowles to try out various options, from the size of the text to the timing of the animation, and the way they are structured on screen. “We tried a lot of different things to get something that felt right, that felt like it was going to occupy your mind and be visually satisfying, but not feel overwhelming, with too much movement,” Macdonald explains. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/PhoneCall016_1.mp4 Knowles says that a key unlock came when they decided to use Franklin Gothic for the type – the same font used on Lennon and Ono’s famous 1969 War is Over poster. They also developed a split screen design with one speaker on each side. The final visuals animated word for word, “like a game of Pong” and individuals are colour-coded for clarity – Lennon is yellow, like the famous submarine. Macdonald says the simplicity of the graphics is paradoxically powerful. “I have this feeling that the most cinematic moments happen when you don’t see everything – when you’re given space for your mind to do the work,” he says. Planning Unit’s title graphics for One to One: John & Yoko. Courtesy of Plan B/KM Films and Mercury Studios. One to One: John & Yoko is set against a turbulent era in American history and tells the story of Lennon and Ono’s personal, political and artistic responses to that upheaval. It also includes footage of Lennon’s only full-length performances after The Beatles, remastered by the couple’s son, Sean Ono Lennon. Planning Unit worked on everything from the titles and the posters to other in-film graphics – like an electoral map for Nixon’s 1972 presidential victory. For the captions that help contextualise the narrative and archive footage, Macdonald was inspired by Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas, himself a collaborator of Lennon and Ono’s. Mekas created captions by typing sentences onto paper, sticking them to a wall and filming them. “There’s something very homemade about those poorly-typed captions, and it spoke to me about that period and its lack of pretentiousness,” Macdonald says. But it turned out replicating Mekas’ style was easier said than done. Knowles tried various tricks in After Effects, adding “grain and jitter” to try and recreate the same sensibility. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/Jonas-Mekas-001.mp4 “We did a lot of work trying to match it, but in the end we couldn’t quite get the quality of the typewriter,” Knowles explains. Eventually they borrowed the typewriter from the reconstruction of Lennon and Ono’s flat used in the film, and Knowles typed them out himself, much like Mekas used to do. “It looks very simple, but actually it was a lot of work to figure out,” Macdonald says. “The digital versions all felt a bit ironic.” Knowles is proud of the final outcome and pleased that the studio was able to work on such a wide range of the film’s visuals. “As designers, one of our bugbears is when we’re watching a film and the graphics within it are different to the titles, which are different to the end titles, and that’s all different to the posters,” he says. “That’s when we start twitching. But this was a lot more hands-on than just being given a list of deliverables.” He says it was important that Franklin Gothic was contemporaneous with the time the film depicts – he recalls designers’ widespread horror at the war film 1917‘s use of Futura (released in 1927) – but also that it was used consistently. “We were keen to create a thread going through the movie that becomes its graphic identity,” Knowles explains. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/Main-Title.mp4 Planning Unit’s poster for One to One: John & Yoko. Courtesy of Plan B/KM Films and Mercury Studios.