This is an attempt at the Kinetic Typography assignment, which I’ve been working on in little bits for nearly two weeks now.  I ended up choosing a song rather than a speech — an idea that stemmed from that one Daily Create about using copyrighted music.  Anyway, on that day I had Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower stuck in my head, so I went with that.

The process:
I made this using After Effects.   First I imported the song.  After that, I typed each word in its own separate text box (which makes them each into their own layer).  I finally figured out at least a basic technique for audio marking — you can add numbered tags by hitting shift and a number at the same time, so that shift + 1 gives you a tag numbered 1 and so on.  I made about 8 of these and dragged the marker to the start of every fourth word or so, to keep better track of where each word was. This and the “RAM preview with audio” button were very helpful discoveries for matching up the words.

The markers help, but it’s still a really tedious process. I’d given up on it a few times before, and it’s still not very good in some places. A lot of the images (the mountain, businessmen, gears in the head) were done with what is the simplest way to add images in AE that I’ve found so far — import the image file, drag it to the composition so that it becomes a new layer, and then shorten that layer in the timeline so that it only shows up at certain points of the video. The signpost, exit sign, and wine bottle were all done by splitting the layer (Edit menu –> Split Layer) every couple of frames and altering the rotation (Transform –> X rotation, Y rotation, and/or Z rotation) gradually throughout those frames.

Credit to The Noun Project for the majority of the images: signpost, exit, mental health, business suit, wine bottle, mountain, construction. I altered all of them in Illustrator by adding various textures — the same collection of old paper that I’ve been using since design week.

This got blocked from Youtube within minutes, and the first version was way over Vimeo’s maximum file size. I went back to After Effects to trim out a bit of stuff and managed to get it down to just under the limit. If there were more than 24 hours in a day, I’d have liked to mess with this a bit more, especially the typography itself. It’s a bit boring. And very uneven in places, which was not always on purpose. And hardly any of the typography itself is animated, I got carried away with the images.   But imperfections and frustrations aside, this was still really fun to play around with, and especially satisfying in those few places where the timing came out on point.