Communication Studio: Type in Motion
The final project of C Mini! Working off our typesetting assignment, our goal was to create a video about our chosen typeface in After effects. I started off the assignment by choosing a song.
On Music
I was lucky enough to find a song that really resonated with me very early on in the process. Building upon my chosen adjectives, I wanted to pick a song that was heavy, bold, and old fashioned. I strayed away from light trap beats and jazz. I looked at soviet music composers like Dmitri Shostakovich. Soviet composers seem to have a very heavy, progressive sound.
The song I ended up choosing was ‘Euphoria funfair’ from the Euphoria soundtrack. It had a nice heavy beat and strong classical elements.
Storyboarding and Style Shots
Because of the time crunch of this project, I wasn’t able to fully explore every direction that came to me in my storyboard.
Because of its rich historical context, I wanted to start talking about Plantin’s history before revealing the font. I felt a little lost in the storyboarding process because I wasn’t sure if my ideas could be executed well on afterEffects, which led me to hold back a little on flashy elements. There are some moments that are very well planned to the beat (the middle portion) and moments that were not thought through very well at all (the beginning).
I took a lot of inspiration from my spread for these storyboards. Maybe a bit too much? However, I am happy with how I’ve been able to maintain a consistent tone throughout so far.
First Pass (Thursday)
Above is the beginnings of my first draft. There are some parts that are more realised than others. While I had most of the beginning storyboard figured out, I found myself being much more limited by the music than I had originally expected, so I ran into a lot of issues with pacing.
I also had some issues with afterEffects because I was importing all my assets from illustrator. I ended getting really overwhelmed with all the artboards I had imported and ended up just starting from scratch, using the built in type tool on illustrator instead.
At this point, I was starting to feel really frustrated and felt like I was moving in the wrong direction, as I felt like my video was much simpler than the examples shown. However, whenever I would go back to revise my storyboards, I wasn’t able to integrate any interesting new elements that was still true to the personality of my typeface. After meeting with Vicki and being assured that I was going in the right direction, I decided to just power through I finish my rough draft so I could go back and work on pacing issues later.
Additional Notes
- I jump baseline a lot. Be sure to work with the grid so that everything stays consistent
- There are some issues with legibility in the beginning. Maybe work on shorten your script? Legibility takes priority over flashy animations!
- The moving background is a move in the right direction. Maybe try to make it less distracting and make each image you move to more meaningful? Definitely an improvement from the zoomed out background.
- It is really hard for students to do body text well in their videos! How can I change this? What can I do to take attention away from the body text?
Second Pass (Tuesday)
It felt very freeing to start over. After learning from my mistakes, my workflow was a lot quicker. I made some small stylistic changes and ended up deviating from the original storyboard quite a bit.
The above is the original script vs. the new shortened script. I focused on eliminating adverbs that weren’t communicative of everything, and I also wrinkled out all the awkward spots in the beginning to tell a better story.
Summary of Changes
- Readability: Changed back to Plantin regular from Plantin bold. I also was much more conservative with my use of capitalisation as lower case letters are usually quicker to read.
- Color: I finally decided on a final colour palette that I aim to keep consistent throughout the video. I am also starting to use yellow much more sparsely.
- Refining my baseline and being more mindful of the positioning of my text.
- Aside from the biggest changes being the addition of two new scenes that diverted from the storyboard, Most of the things I did leading up to Final crit had more to do with pacing and readability.
Final Crit (Thursday)
The feedback I got from final crit were minor and mostly had to do with pacing and readability.
- Contrast between background and body text (contentious)
- Images can get distracting at some point
- Typesetting the paragraph better
- Adjusting spacing in numbers
- Add an end credits
Again, given the time crunch of this project, my process was a lot more straightforward because I didn’t have much time to iterate. Having to commit to an idea very early made me very apprehensive about my the direction my video was going.
Final Video
I care a lot about motion graphics. When it comes to things I care a lot about, it is sometimes very difficult for me to stop putting so much pressure on myself and just enjoy the process of making. The biggest thing I learned from doing this project was that sometimes, it’s better to just take some time away from something so you can come back to it with a fresher perspective. After working on this video, I’ve gotten a lot better at AfterEffects. However, this means that I end up getting too sucked into the working process and losing sight of the bigger picture. While I am not very happy with the final result, overall, I am still satisfied with what I was able to get out of this project. The most rewarding process of this project was definitely being able to build a story around my chosen typeface. Every designed object has a story, and I won’t see Plantin the same way after this.