Assignment 1b: Kinetic Typography
Due: February 12 (beginning of class)
Kinetic Typography Definition
"Kinetic typography—the technical name for "moving text"—is an animation technique mixing motion and text to express ideas using video animation. The text is presented over time in a manner intended to convey or evoke a particular idea or emotion."
"Kinetic typography is the art of animating text to increase its impact on readers by increasing the emotive and interactive quality of the text. Text is presented over time, becoming temporal rather than static. "
Together with audio of spoken words the appearance of the words is often synchronizes with the audio. It's purpose can be, for example, to illustrate, clarify, intensify or even contradict the text/speech/interview. In a way it's a visual interaction with spoken words using type.
Read this article
Task
Our text and audio file is an excerpt from an interview with the influential film title designer Saul Bass. Task it to create a typographic animation synchronized with the audio of the interview. Use movement and appearance of the words to support, enhance, illustrate the spoken words.
Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos. During his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood's most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Among his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, the credits racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of a skyscraper in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the disjointed text that races together and apart in Psycho.
Download the audio file and import it into After Effects. The downloaded folder contains several audio formats. Depending on your platform (Mac/PC) you need a certain format for After Effects. First try the .wav file. If you can't import that try any of the others.
Here is the excerpt:
"With these titles I came to grips with of what I think is the most challenging aspect of any creative endavour: And that is to deal with ordinary things. Things that we know so well that we cease to see them. Deal with them in a way that allows us to understand them again. In a sense it’s making the ordinary extraordinary."
And the full interview:
Composition Settings:
- Preset: HDV/HDTV 720 29.97
- Width: 1920 px
- Height: 1080 px
- Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square Pixels
- Frame Rate: 29.97 (or 30)
- Resolution: Full
- Start Timecode: 0;00;00;00
- Duration: 0;00;25;00 (which will result in a 25 sec timeline)
- Background Color: Black (or White)
Limitations/Elements:
- Font: Akzidenz Grotesk Medium (or Helvetica Medium/Bold if you don't have AG)
- Background and type colors: Black and white as well as greytones/transparency
- Elements: Only type, no shapes except rectangles for using Tracking Mats or Masks
- Proportions of letters should stay intact throughout (no distortion, squeeze or stretch)
After Effects Tutorials
From the "Essential Training: Motion Graphics Tutorial" work through chapter 4. "Working with Type".