Technology meets audio and visual artistry in a short Web film promoting the Google Input Tools extension for Chrome, which allows users to type in multiple languages—more than 80—on the web.

Created by Studio G and directed by Josh Raskin, the film finds three people trying to describe idioms that don’t easily translate from one language to another. We never see these people. We simply hear their voices and various background noises, depending on where they were recorded. Their words are illustrated by a tumble of imagery ranging from line drawings to stop-motion animation to live-action video. For example, while one man tries to describe the essence of the Fiji-Hindi word “talanoa,” which refers to the feeling one might get while engaging in warm talk with friends late on a Friday night, we observe a stream of sights that includes a laptop made of cardboard, porcelain animal figurines swirling about and chunks of a computer keyboard that come together to form a person’s head.

Google’s Input Tools allows translation across devices, remembers corrections and creates a custom dictionary for uncommon words, like talanoa.