Need Help: Fifth Element - Mr. Kim Leng Flying Boat Text

[BigKidsToyCo]

Hello RPF'ers !

So ... Wow.... this account hasn't posted anything in probably 4-5 Years!

After building the Umbrella XJ and getting Married, Life got a little crazy.

But here we are ! Still happily married. To the same wonderful woman. LOL. Two awesome kiddos, still doing RPF hobbies on the side and running two businesses while working a full time 8-5 to pay the Mortgage....so life got a bit hectic everyone! haha!

This year i'm making some gifts for family members for Christmas. Specifically, I'm finding a lot of enjoyment making Signs based on things from Movies and TV Shows. Example, This year I built my wife a 1' x 4' recreation of the Jade Wolf Chinese Food Restaurant sign from ShadowHunters. Came out awesome, I'll post pictures soon.

For my brother, I'm wanting to make him what is likely going to scale into a 10" x 4' sign. The 'banner' from the Flying Boat in Fifth Element.

Most refer online to Mr. Kim Leng Thai Food.

I was hoping someone could help me because I've asked Numerous people, even emailed a guy from this forum, asked some friends in Discord, searched Google, etc., and I'm starting to wonder if the 'thai text' to the right of the banner is actually any words in Thai, or if it is just made up letters/font that have no meaning.

I have attached a picture of the text I'm trying to understand.

Can anyone confirm if this is even real text? ( Real text / font would make the artwork to run thru my vinyl plotter 100x faster to do ) If its determined that it is not real text, well then I'll just have to take this picture and try to recreate all of the text by carefully moving points around in illustrator which is going to take a few hours versus a few minutes haha.

On the sign I made for my wife, I was able to convert from picture to English and determine what the actual Chinese text was and type it back out and scale it, etc.

Any help would be really appreciated.

- William

 

[smithjohnj]

I can tell you it is NOT written in Thai script. There seem to be elements of both Japanese and Chinese. I am interested in what more knowledgeable members can contribute.

 

[Rogviler]

If I had $100, I would put $90 on it being total nonsense, $5 on it being a dumb production crew easter egg, and $5 on a lottery ticket.

I think you probably could cobble it together with various bits and pieces of Asian language fonts, but you would probably be better off just redrawing it.

 

[Kaderian]

I also found nothing and then decided to do it that way. I didn't want to use any text that then translates to something wild.

Sorry for my bad english

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

The replies from everyone have been great. I'm going to change my primary sign text to match the model above.

I'm just guessing that people chose to go with 'Mr. Kim Leng' on the banner instead of D' Ko Leng for that sake of easier recognition?

I'm going to make mine be as close to the move as possible and use the text above, the actual D' Ko Leng.

I'm going to take a crack at converting the text to vector. I think I can clean it up in photoshop, do an inside stroke to make the text a little thinner/cleaner, then move it over to illustrator for final cleanup.

I'll post the file here for free / for anyone to use when I am finished.

Thanks everyone!

 

[Kaderian]

The replies from everyone have been great. I'm going to change my primary sign text to match the model above.

I'm just guessing that people chose to go with 'Mr. Kim Leng' on the banner instead of D' Ko Leng for that sake of easier recognition?

I'm going to make mine be as close to the move as possible and use the text above, the actual D' Ko Leng.

I'm going to take a crack at converting the text to vector. I think I can clean it up in photoshop, do an inside stroke to make the text a little thinner/cleaner, then move it over to illustrator for final cleanup.

I'll post the file here for free / for anyone to use when I am finished.

Thanks everyone!

I don't know if this is right. In the movie it looks like this.

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

Correct - It looks like the sticker I found online for reference made their own text referencing Mr. Kim in the banner instead of what the actual Banner on the flying boat had. So I'm going to change that and use the text above / the text in the model that was posted for reference instead.

Should be fun ... I'm thinking about finding a piece of like 8 or 10" x 4' wood to use and use paint and the vinyl as a 'masking' for the lettering instead of purely out of vinyl.

 

[Jintosh]

Looking at your online reference, I almost wonder if they were going for an ALMOST literal English translation...

...something like this. But I still couldn't make something out of it.

 

[Pro Mod]

Unfortunately it's been removed from the original.

 

[Jintosh]

I'm impressed that you found a pic of the original.

 

[Pro Mod]

I'm impressed that you found a pic of the original.

It is / was on display at Cité du cinema in France, along with the taxi and police car - Les services | La Cité du Cinéma

 

[division 6]

Perhaps......
Since there are aliens in the movie, it's supposed to be some form of alien text.

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

Now this is some smart thinking... At least, at minimum, you have given an excuse to the potentially 'made up' text..... This is a solid reply hahahah.

I am intricately erasing out these letters to have a solid form to live trace at this point Lol.

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

Update: I may have a smarter idea with some old school..... blow up the picture, print it, trace it, scan it etc .... will try to update again before leaving for home later.

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

Another minor update:

Just for anyone interested, the T-Shirts online and the sticker I used as reference in the initial post, is lazy. Haha.

They used 'Chinese Takeaway' as the font and made literally zero changes.

The movie though, looks like they equally used the same font as a Base, and then changed some points and angles on things to give it a minor twist that couldn't be easily copied by just finding a font online. Which is funny considering that would have been back in like 1995/1996.

I'll try not to update this with any 'nerd' stuff until I make more progress and can actually provide a picture update or something.

 

[MakeShiJie]

From what i know the text in the picture is Chinese, but the text has no specific meaning, just a random combination of Chinese text. I have marked the Chinese text in blue, but I can’t guarantee its accuracy, because some text in the picture is very weird.

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

This is Outstanding Information !!!

Can you help make this easier for me ? ( At least I'm being Honest LOL )

Could you put this in a copy / paste form here on the forum? So I can download some additional chinese fonts to copy and paste this text into to try to find something similar to tweak?

Thanks ShiJie !

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

Update:

Here's what I've decided to do for now since I'm running out of time:

I enlarged the decal, traced it and filled it in with sharpy. Scanned it back in, did a fill and an inside stroke and live traced it.

So here is the finished text in a vector version that can be cut with a plotter

 

[MakeShiJie]

I don't know if these Chinese text will help you. I changed two texts, to make them more accurate, and the new text is marked in green
刀尼仑丹刁马七井仑刁仑

勇气 8014365 乧洽這

 

[BigKidsToyCo]

Well.... unfortunately, I think I'm going to bail on this project... which is very much Not my style... but the scaling is crazy and I should have realized that.

As it stands, to make this large enough to be cool on a wall, I'm looking at making it 10' long.

I guess I could make it from cloth and literally hand sew this thing together so that its a physical banner?

But theres a LOT of little **** in this thing that I'd have to sew, even if I skip-sewed it every few inches and of all the things I have access to, a sewing machine is not one of them lol.

Attached, free for anyone to use, is an illustrator vector of the art that I was able to put together.

I lightly modified all of the text from the font to look a bit more accurate.... I literally blew up and sharpied the 'chinese' text on the top side, and made use of the chinese that was converted by MakeShieJie for the lower part and again cleaned up / simplified the number text from Chinese Takeaway.

RPF Members: It would NOT let me upload the .AI file.... if anyone wants it, or wants to host a link to it, let me know and I'll send it to you.

Thanks,

William