Project 4

Title:

What I’ve Done

Research:

My initial research consisted of finding and watching examples of kinetic typography. Many of these examples used sound samples from television shows or videos. They also used interesting backgrounds. Some even used images and illustrations.

Treatment:

At first, I wanted to use a movie or television sound clip for my video, but I couldn’t find one that I wanted to use. Instead, I decided to use about 40 seconds of a Linkin Park song, “What I’ve Done”. I decided to use dark and contrasting colors, mostly black and red, to emulate the song’s dark edge. The song’s lyrics seem like they could be a person’s private thoughts. Therefore, I decided to make the background look like a notebook page where these thoughts could be written down and later erased or destroyed. I decided that all of the text and image animations would appear on the notebook page similar to how an individual’s journaling would. I decided to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create my background and images. These images would support the song’s lyrics in some way.

Analysis:

Since, my sound clip was a song, I couldn’t make my text speed around very fast like in the kinetic typology examples I saw online. Instead, I focused on keeping my text’s movement flowing and smooth. I also tried to make sure that the text lyric lines stayed in time and in sync with the song. If I were to do the project again, I think I would do a faster song or make sure that I had audio of a video clip.
I mostly used key frames to change my text and images’ position, scale, rotation, and opacity. I also applied several animation presets including mirror and type writer to my text. I used masks to reveal or erase text. In addition, I applied the film burn effect to an adjustment layer that I added to the entire video. I also set the adjustment layer’s blending mode to multiply in order to darken the video and give it a harsher effect.

Conclusion:

Overall, I seemed to have a difficult time with this project. I already spent an enormous amount of time on it but I still feel like I need more time. Every time I tested my video, I found something wrong with it that I needed to fix. Finally, I just didn’t have enough time to fix it. I think my end result of this project won’t really match a lot of the videos we will see in class. The text animations flow around the screen to match the song’s lyrics instead of speeding across the page to catch up with dialogue and sound effects.