Kinetic Type Research Document

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brief

introduction

choice

research

design

conclusion

brief 01 Carefully select 15 seconds of audio from the supplied audio files. You are asked to document, analyse, understand and capture the essence of the audio file through generating a body of research via sketchbooks, drawings and other typographic experiments.

The method of communication for your section will be through kinetic type, we want you to consider language, typography, colour, font selection, flow, pace and narrative to fully communicate to your audience the emotion and narrative.

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As a starting point consider:

Typeface Weight of font Colour Lay out Motion Sca

- - P a c e Angle le

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introduction 02 This project seemed fairly unusual, as it was essentially an almost entirely technical exercise. I, like seemingly everyone else in our class, hadn’t really used After Effects before, and therefore the true mission of this project was to master the software.

That isn’t to say that this project is less worthwhile - just about every design professional I’ve asked has advised me to learn After Effects, as for putting together a work show‑reel, there is no better option.

However, if I’m totally honest, this project did not exactly thrill me - I don’t really consider ‘kinetic typography’ to be a legitimate form of design, more a tool for music lyric videos or fan tributes to speeches.

I was particularly disappointed we weren’t allowed to choose our own source material for the audio - if I had been able to, perhaps it would have made this project more enjoyable, but as it was, I was stuck with ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’.

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choice 03 The most logical first step, it seemed to me, was to listen to the four episodes and choose a passage.

Already I hit upon a stumbling block - presenter Neil MacGregor’s voice.

What was said about the objects was interesting enough, but I couldn’t listen to Mr MacGregor without a slight feeling of physical sickness. His emphesis on ‘e’ sounds, most noticably ‘tea’ and ‘BBC’, was particularly unbearable.

So this lead me to trying a different approach - of singling out the guest speakers for a 15 second sound snippet.

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A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 100 FOUR OBJECTS 09

choice 03 Amazingly enough, many of the guest speakers were also proud owners of totally bizarre or amazingly irritating voices, so my options became increasingly limited. Whilst this aversion to the more unusual timbres of voice on display might seem a little petty, I knew from past experience of video editing that I would be hearing my 15 seconds of sound hundreds and hundreds of times.

Finally I came across a soundbyte that didn’t make me wretch comedy politician Boris Johnson’s view on the legendary Roman Imperator, Augustus Caesar.

Mr Johnson’s monologue was perfect his voice was inflected with emphesis and variety, and his metaphorical comparison of Augustus to a captain of a football team was a particular highlight. Whilst I may not approve of his politics, ‘BoJo’ certainly has some rhetorical skill.

Augustus himself is a fascinating character - a great uniter of the Roman Empire, under the famous slogan of pax romana (Roman Peace).

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WELL HE WAS ABOUT THE

GREATEST POLITICIAN

THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN. IF YOU WANTED TO HAVE A

FIRST ELEVEN

OF THE WORLD’S LEADING POLITICIANS, MOST ACCOMPLISHED DIPLOMATS AND IDEOLOGUES OF ALL TIME,

AUGUSTUS

YOU’D HAVE AS YOUR KIND OF

MID‑FIELD PLAYMAKER, CAPTAIN OF THE ELEVEN.

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research 04 typeface The trickiest parts of researching visual material for a project like this are: 1.

Documenting videos - there will have to be many screenshots in the next few pages, as kinetic type videos are, well, videos.

2. Knowing where to look - kinetic type rarely reaches the hallowed ground of graphic design blogs or exhibitions, and therefore YouTube and Vimeo trawling was required.

Another important area of research was type. Font choice was important in this project, and as such we were asked to look into type history and usage.

Unfortunately the list of websites for research was a little outdated - several of the links no longer led to a functioning website (sorry Sarah!). But there were still some interesting sites I hadn’t come across before, and many more that I had.

We shall start by looking at the type then, if that’s OK with you, of course. Yes? Good.

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research 04

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Trajan Pro Trajan Pro abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz As you can see, my first ports of call were the classics - futura, univers, baskerville, etc. The only image here which I don’t think immediately reveals its name is Miller Display (second from the left). Designed by type aficionado Matthew Carter, it’s deliciously curvy, without looking irregular in the way that other semi decorative serifs can look.

These are all excellent fonts, but none of them really screamed ‘Caesar Augustus’.

Then I heard a scream emanating from somewhere deep inside Font Book; it was Trajan Pro. It was screaming ‘Caesar Augustus! Caesar Augustus!’.

Even though Trajan might seem like the most obvious/clichéd font choice, I realised that an all caps serif would be the only true way of conveying the majesty of Caesar Augustus, the royal pomp and splendour of his being.

I decided though that I wasn’t quite

ready to fully commit to Trajan, as I felt ers : v that an entire video of it might get a n i se +un ers little tedious. So, wanting to avoid a o v h i ‘Trajady’, I decided to use mostly Univers n c n ers with Trajan a j s u providing support. a t tr jan+ niv s fon r tra jan+u nive s 15 r tra jan+u nive s r u

HOW COULD ANYONE RESIST

THIS COMBINATION? (they couldn’t)* 16

*I couldn’t

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research kinetic type Now that I had decided on a font combo, it was time to look at some other kinetic type videos for inspiration, as well as Augustus himself.

As I previously mentioned I’m not enormously familiar with the medium of kinetic typography, but there were two that I had enjoyed previously.

The first is a monologue by Stephen Fry on language, and the second is the famous speech from ‘Network’ (written

by Paddy Chayefsky), in which the protagonist has a breakdown about the state of the world live on TV. However both of these I like not for their design, but the content of the audio/type.

And frankly there are literally thousands and thousands of videos like these, with only the slightest variations. It might, for example, be noted that both these videos exclusively use Helvetica - that seems to apply to around 95% of this ‘designform’.

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research 04 Nevertheless, it is a requirement of our brief to explore and research the medium, so I did, and here are some examples of the more interesting videos out there.

On the left is an example which includes imagery, something we’re banned from using by the brief. Nevertheless it contained some nice clean typographic treatment, and good ue of colour.

The next example is from a poem about how nowadays people add questions to things that aren’t questions and things like and yeah?

You know? This example was useful in combining sans serifs and serifs in much the same way as I wanted to.

The third is based on Conan O’Brien’s emotional goodbye speech on leaving the Late Night Show on CBS - this employs a ‘Gastrotypographicalassemblage’ style solid block of type, which the camera navigates around, rather than the type itself moving. This is cool but I have no idea how to do it. So, yeah?

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design 05 Enough looking at the work of others!

It is time to look at my attempts. This was incredibly frustrating, as trying to ‘typographise’ on After Effects was like trying to make puns in Icelandic.

All my skills felt redundant and inaccessible in the face of the extremely confusing interface of After Effects, and consequently I struggled to make arrangements and transitions that I liked.

But that I guess was the point, right?

Anyway, I approached it head on, not designing anything outside of After Effects, even though InDesign was beckoning me in with its familiar world of columns and ‘balance ragged lines’. Instead it was all keyframes and motion blur.

As my final video was a direct continuation of my first attempt I don’t have a great deal to show in terms of iteration, so here are just some stills from the video.

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Oxymoron?

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design 05

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design 05 ouroboros This is a brief aside about a plug in for After Effects that looked really amazing, but unfortunately I could not get it to do what I wanted. Its name is Ouroboros, and you can find it at www.sandervandijk.tv/blog/ouroboros The idea is that their programming will allow you to animate the lines in your video very easily. The main reason it didn’t work out for me is that I did not realise that this would not work on text, even when rasterised/outlined.

But anyway, I just wanted to vent about that, and show you the cool effects that my project could have benefited from. Oh well, no use crying over incompatible plug-ins, as they say.

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conclusion 06 Whilst I am glad to have done this project, I feel it is probably the one I have enjoyed least on this course.

I feel that, for a project essentially based in technological ability, we did not receive enough tuition in After Effects to be able to really use it properly.

I was also very disappointed with our allocated source material. To have something foisted upon us would be one thing, but to have such a limited scope of potential sound-bytes to draw from was incredibly frustrating, and I personally cannot see the benefit in that.

However, it was good to be finally forced to use After Effects, as it is a useful platform to have some skill in. I am relatively pleased with my outcome, although I am more pleased that I now can look at After Effects without passing out from confusion.

But my main conclusion would be that I did not enjoy this project.

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