For one of the assignments, I decided to create a kinetic typography video from Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York, where Bill “the Butcher” Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, delivers a chilling speech. I love kinetic typography videos, so I thought I’d jump in. The first thing I learned when starting this assignment is that kinetic typography views are very, very hard to make. So I shortened the speech as much as I could within reason, and set to work using After Effects. The film takes place in the 1860s in Five Points, New York, so I wanted it to look a bit like an old 1800s newspaper. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be (if it were possible, I’d rate this assignment 10 stars), but it was a lot of fun to mess around with the different possibilities.
This may be the hardest assignment yet, and perhaps all semester. The video assignment naturally includes audio and illustration so the time required for a successful assignment is huge. I picked the “Kinetic Typography” assignment from the DS106 assignment bank. I was inspired by the Sherlock Holmes example on the landing page for the assignment. I’ve also been inspired all semester by animations and it seems half of my critiques this semester have been on animated shorts. My choice in subject matter directly relates to my theme ‘the importance of creative arts in education,’ and my scholarship with the works of Ken Robinson. I just downloaded his latest book this week as an mp3 that I can listen to while I work. Needless to say his well-spoken narrative voice is ringing in my head.
Thumbnail Concept
Creative Process
I first created a very rough sketch, also known as a ‘thumbnail’ to get my mind moving in the right direction. This sketch only took 3-5 minutes and the purpose of it is for intrinsic value. I usually don’t share things like this with clients but other designers and artists, maybe. The point is to solve the problem by drawing it out and finding intrinsic value before jumping into more complex and time consuming art.
Next, I used Adobe Illustrator to create a large illustration of the entire animation and elements (on separate layers) as I saw them in my head. Before doing this I watched all of the intro tutorial videos to learn how to use Adobe After Effects. Much like the audio assignment, I am completely new to the software and knowledge required to create successfully. I have created simple animations for games UI in Adobe Flash before but never AE. And I have never created an illustrated animation like this so there was definitely some learning curve. Once I finished the animation, I really feel like I can easily navigate, create, and manipulate video elements in AE. Overall, the assignment was really rewarding. I would have liked to do more animations, but it takes time to make buildings pop out of a planet and for jet planes to race text past an opening book with an illuminated light bulb igniting the wick to a catastrophic explosion!
Did she ever tell you she had a brother? Probably not. Some things are best to keep close and not let other people see. Lest they use it as a weapon against you.
He died in the War. It was something that tore Victoire apart. She thought that watching the Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin by help… for some reason. Isn’t the weirdest things the ones that made people feel better?
Well, when Chaplin got to the part about soldiers, it didn’t make Victoire feel better, it enraged her. It filled her with a fire to rebel. His words seared themselves into her memory. When she closed her eyes, the words stood out against the stars she saw behind her eyelids.
And rebel she did.
For this assignment I used The Greatest Speech Ever Made by Charlie Chaplin. Beyond the fact that it fits in with Victoire’s history concerning her brother and her fall into the criminal world, I personally am always very moved by this speech. Here is the video of the speech, and here is the link to the full text.
I used a iMovie to do this assignment, and used audacity to record the music in the background then imported it into iMovie. The song is from youtube, and is called Window.
I tried my hand poorly a few weeks ago at the ds106 Kinetic Typography assignment. There is a reason maybe only 3 or 4 people have braved this one.
Kinetic typography (“moving text”) is an animation technique that allows a creative entrepreneur to mix text and motion. Your job is to take a speech or bit of dialog (try audiobooks, movies, TV shows, etc.) and animate it like this example from Sherlock Holmes. Consider how you could visually enforce the speech’s underlying themes… or subvert them. Be creative!
Without too much fanfare, and a nood to my fellow ds106ers who dig Cool Hand Luke, the classic line by Strother Martin’s aptly named character “Captain”, but more with the lines around it. The whole thing of putting people in their perceived places? What we have here…
I got hooked on thie film a year ago, and did a minimalist posteras well as a Macguffin. It’s just a classic on many fronts, and not just for Paul Newman’s larger than life performance, but many others in the mix. “A night in the box”?
I really fumbled around with this in Adobe After Affects. I swore I had the full version on my old Mac, since I had the CSS 5 full suite, but apparently in some fit of file cleaning, I sapped some key files, and it would not load. So I went for the student approach, the 30 day trial run.
While I ought to give a full blown process run down. I watched a few tutorials, and got the key tip on control scrubbing the audio to match the word entrance. After Effects is not for the feint of software. There are so many settings, effects (duh) and ways you can put key frames and ween things. I did not get as far as playing with the typing effects or the camera effects, so it was pretty much popping the words up in sync with the sound. I did a few position tweens, some with a box blur effect.
It was alos a fumble fest with rendering it. But I bulled through it, and now have some awareness of when I might reach for this large hammer again.
Some men you just can’t reach.
Maybe because they are fiddling with key frames or lost in renderland.
This is some seriously time-consuming stuff. And I still don’t have it right.
I did this in AfterEffects, which I had never used before. I started out by trying to follow this tutorial, but things weren’t working as planned. So I scrapped it, and this morning tried using this one, which worked a little better. I couldn’t get the sound to play when using the scrubber, so I made the audio waveform visible and tried to align the word with that. Still needs tweaking, but I’m putting it out there as is for now.
Several years ago, I was out in a local tavern with some friends on St. Patrick’s Day. They had a dj spinning vinyl for the occasion. I made my way through the crowd and asked the dj if he had this song. When it came on, most of the bar started dancing to it – most of them were old enough to recognize the song. My crew knew it from the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. Realizing that I was responsible for this, one of my friends turned to me and said, “You’re sick, Paul.”
