Peggasus988’s Weblog

Kinetic Typography, the current project is to focus on this and produce an interesting after effects piece. Not being very confident after the first year on working with after effects hopefully this year will be better. The brief is simple; take a piece of music, an excerpt from a film or a poem and use it as a soundtrack and produce an animated piece of Kinetic Typography in After Effects.The finished piece should be no more than 3 minutes in length and should be a graphic representation in type of your soundtrack. Issues of use of colour, readability, timing and motion are all things you should focus on as well as the idea of storytelling through vissual imagery.

I have already researched into this by looking into other Kinetic typography pieces as well as looking into title sequences. My biggest fear with this project so far is the aspect of wanting to look individual, so many of the examples I have seen all look the same and so few stand out amongst the others. I have looked already at the title sequences for Eurotrip, Chuck, Casino Royale, Seven, Snatch and 300. I have also looked at Kinetic type sequences from Shaun of the dead, Pulp fiction, Full metal Jacket as well as sequences for certain songs. I am currently yet to find a set amount of speech to use for my type, however in watching the title sequence for Snatch , I like the use of language within the film.

I have developed my likening to Snatch to another Guy Ritchie film; Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and thus have decided to use the text from a well known scene from the film. the famous pub scene when one of the actors within the film talks to another about a character named Rory.

Rory Breaker
Rory? Yeah I know Rory, He’s not to be underestimated!
He’s a funny looking fucker I know but you gotta look past the hair and the cute cuddly thing…its all a deceptive fas’cade
TAP!
A few nights ago rorys roger iron rusted so hes gone down
(tv has busted)
the battle cruiser to watch the end of a football game.
(boozer)
No ones watching the custard so he switches the channel over.
(tele)
A fat gezzers north opens and he wanders up and
(fat chaps mouth opens)
turns the Liza over
(turns the channel over)

“Now fuck off and watch it somewhere else”

Rory knows claret is imminent but he doesn’t wanna miss the
(blood)
end of the game. So calm as a coma, picks up the fire extinguisher, walks straight past the jam roles who are ready
(arseholes)
for action and plonks it outside the entrance, he then orders an Aristotle of the most ping pong tiddly in the nuclear sub
(bottle) (strongest drink in the pub)
and switchs back to his footer.

“that’s fucking it says the gezzer”
“that’s fucking what? says rory”

and he gobs out a mouthful of booze covering fatty, he flicks a flaming match into his birds nest and the gezzers lit up like a
(chest)
leaking gas pipe, rory unphased turns back to his game (heh)
his teams won too… 4/0

This is an example of some of the ideas I have had while thinking about colour and type for the motion graphics project, Im pretty sure these are the colours I would like to work with however I do feel the type doesnt really reflect the feel of the pub scene.

From this point on in the project we started having After Effects workshops with Holly, during this period I found myself understanding alot more than I had last year and toward the end of the workshop sessions I felt very confident in what I was planning to do. Holly had helped me learn how to use Nulls properly as well as cameras and expressions and considering last year I had problems with Keyframes this was quite a big step for me.

Alot of aspects changed for me while I was working on in the workshop sessions with Holly. As I became more aware of my abilities I wanted to set my goals a little higher, now I felt like I knew what I was doing I wanted to show that in my work. So I decided to change the Kinetic type I would be working on and instead of doing the pub scene from Lock Stock, I decided to do a song instead. This was not just due to wanting to do something a bit harder but also because I felt that the better motion graphic pieces usually were based around songs.

In choosing a song to use, I already had fixed ideas of what I wanted to do and so thusly this part of my project was quickly dealt with. I have long been a fan of Tenacious D and in seeing some of the kinetic type pieces that have already been done, I set myself the challenge to do a better example.

I now had the band I wanted to chose a song from, but what song should it be, I didn’t want to chose a really long song because even though I was confident I didn’t want to give myself a song I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish. However I wanted a song that would make my work look good. After looking through several songs I eventually came to the song “Classico” which is from the album “Pick of Destiny” and is fifty nine seconds long.

The lyrics for this song are below;

Can’t you see he’s the man, let me hear you applaud
he is more than a man he’s a shiny golden god.

If you think its time to fucking rock, and fucking roll, out of control,
well then you know you got to rock the block,
you fucking suck my fucking cock,
’cause when you rule, you fucking school, all of the fools, out of their jewels,
’cause if you think it’s time to,
if you think it’s time,
if you think it’s time to fucking rock. (extended/prolonged)

He is going to kick your fucking ass,
and you know his name is Kyle Gass,
rocking and fucking rolling,
and fucking rocking,
and fucking rolling,
and fucking [vocal sollo]…buberup buberrup buberup doo doodle dothdo etc.

Even though this song is short, due to the pace of the way in which Jack Black sings, I had more than enough to be getting on with. As well as paying special attention to the type and the colour within the background.

While working on my motion type I had started to look into imagery and wanted to manipulate imagery within my piece. The image above is one of the first pictures I chose to use within my motion type and is a sketched drawing of Jack Black in cartoon form, the image was taken and manipulated to create a whole new image that I would be free to use. This particular image was used towards the beginning of the song and was used to reflect a comment on “man”

One of the aspects about using imagery within After Effects is that once the data is saved and then moved to another computer it will no longer register the imagery unless the imagery had been taken with it. After looking into this problem it became clear that this was a simple linking problem, the same sort of problem one would get if they moved folders or files around in Dreamweaver, I use Dreamweaver as an example simply because I had the same sort within that program as well.

This was the second and last image I decided to use within my motion type. This was mainly due to two reasons, the first being that although I wanted to use imagery within my piece I had trouble finding places to use it as the song wore on. As I had said earlier the pace of which Jack Black sings is very fast, and due to this the opportunity to use images became harder and harder until it was near on impossible to fit them in along side the type.

The second reason as to why I stopped using images as the song wore on was due to the stylization of the motion type I was producing, I had begun looking at moving cameras, manipulating type within a 3D environment and generally controlling the way in which everything was happening around the type. I was looking into ratios, animations and nulls as well as others. All this as well as the speed of the song meant it became very hard/near on impossible for me to illustrate the piece while keeping the type accurate to the words being spoken.

And this is my final piece, This youtube video doesn’t do it justice as it appears to lag ever so slightly and it doesnt appear to be in great quality, this may of however been down to the way in which I formatted it. Overall I was generally happy with the way in which this came out and am espically happy I finished the song, I must admit I do feel that the vocal solo was a bit of a cop-out, I say this due to the aspect that I struggled to make the ending part of the piece. I think the colour and type are well chosen for the song and generally reflect the feel of what is going on aswell as to reflect the band themselves. If was I was to go back and change anything within my project I would probably try to find a way to have more imagery within my motion type because I feel it falls slightly short of the mark without the images to make it stand out.

As I mentioned earlier in my blog I wanted to make my motion graphics stand out and look individual from every one elses, however sadly I don’t think I have achieved this, this is not to say that my motion graphics isn’t good because I think it is, I just find it to be just as good as everyone else’s. However throught the learning process and my development I believe I may now know how to make it stand out and as an example I will try and work on another kinetic video next year to show this. 

As a final note I would like to mention that although motion type is fun it becomes tedious after awhile due to spending hours working on it with only seconds to show, furthermore in response to future projects title sequences may be a better idea.