Kinetic Typography. 3

After experimenting in After Effects for a while, I chose my audio clip and started to work on my kinetic typography. I decided to use the beginning clip of Bop to the Top from the Disney Channel Original movie High School Musical (2006) as this song is fun and energetic. I decided on a red background with yellow text to resemble the ‘Wildcats’ and their basketball uniform. I wanted the typography to be coherent with the audio and context and therefore chose to use fairly ‘cool’, informal san serif fonts, animating them suitably for it to all fit and flow well. I chose this specific song from HSM as the lyrics provoke a lot of imagery such as “anything it takes to climb the ladder of success.” I thought this will be ideal when coming back to further improve this piece through the addition of graphic images. I could also advance my work by masking the background and placing shadows; creating a stage like scene, thus relating back to the context. I hope to carry on experimenting with After Effects, practicing importing imagery and the different animation techniques. To conduct this I will carry on researching into the software and watching online tutorials on websites such as Lynda.com.

Kinetic Typography. 2

As this is my first time using AfterEffects, as well as practising under supervision in workshops, I have watched online tutorials on how to create kinetic typography in this Adobe software. The tutorial I found to be most helpful was After Effects Tutorial – Basic Typography & Motion Graphics by the YouTube user, ‪thevfxbro (2013). He went through the process of animating the text to fit with the audio, to then making the clip look professional through the addition of masks and shadows. In addition, he talked through AfterEffects shortcuts to help make the process quicker and easier. I hope to use these skills when creating my own motion graphics piece.

Furthermore, for inspiration I’ve looked through the Kinetic Typography vimeo channel, considering the different ways people have animated their typography and the various audio used. I found Robin Celebi’s Cave Johnson Lemon Rant, Kinetic Typography (2012) to be my favourite. His emphasise of certain words through animation helped to convey the emotion from the audio, this being something I hope to achieve in my work.

References:

thevfxbro. (2013). After Effects Tutorial – Basic Typography & Motion Graphics. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3h2pbZkMT4

Celebi, R. (2012). Cave Johnson Lemon Rant. Kinetic Typography Vimeo. http://vimeo.com/31960204

AfterEffects Workshop. 2

Today we had our second AfterEffects workshop. We were shown how to import a video into our composition. Before we started, we had to film a short piece of footage of ourselves in front of a large green piece of card. Once we imported this video into AfterEffects we were shown how to remove the green background and replace it with an image of our choice. I decided on an underwater theme and therefore imported a sea background. I was then taught how to mask the fish to place them in front of the video to get a 3D feel. Once we were happy with this we carried on exploring the different ways to animate our text. To improve this clip further I could try animating the fish to move, creating a more life like scenario.

A link to the video will be up shortly.