Text Sequence details

My text sequence is coming along, I've finished scanning in papers and photoshopped most of them but now I'm in the process of animating, playing around with camera movement etc.

I'm thinking about using motion blur in my animation to really show the length and density of those columns of text you see in papers. A sort of bleeding of the ink, a rush of so much information and knowledge in such a small space.

Change of plans. Yet another new idea

I think I've finally settled on an idea for Brief 4. My text sequence will be quite different to what I was thinking about doing before. I've had the idea of manipulating newspaper advertisements and classifieds columns into saying the lyrics of a song by Radiohead called Fitter Happier.

The song isn't a very exciting or particularly melodic song (read: not at all), in fact it isn't so much sung as the voice is generated. But the lyrical poignancy of the song makes me feel the need to portray it in video form.

Fitter Happier is a slightly depressing ballad about consumerism, capitalism and the blue-collar working life. The mechanical voice that "sings" it is fitting with the lyrics themselves because they describe somewhat mechanical human beings - people that exist simply to better themselves or need to better themselves, for more money or power.

I believe newspaper advertisements and classifieds tie into these themes quite well as they're all byproducts of consumerist living. I hope to juxtapose certain imagery with the text to better align with the song's meaning.

For example, for the line, "No more saturated fats or microwave dinners", I am thinking of making it manifest inside a Food Recall section of a newspaper.

So currently I've been scanning in newspaper pages and then editing their text on Photoshop. I will be using masks in After Effects to animate the text spelling itself out on the papers, and probably pan the camera around, showing different areas of a newspaper per line.

In other news:



This video doesn't directly relate to my idea, but I love the use of sand and slides to create a unique visual aesthetic for a title sequence - especially for a movie as fuzzy and baffling as Memento. Very nice stuff.

New brief, new idea

The last brief is about creating a Text Sequence in After Effects (or stop-motion etc.) At the moment I don't have any solid ideas for how I want to create it (though I'm thinking of doing more camera-movement to accentuate urgency), however I do have some ideas about what text I want to actually portray.

An idea I had was to use the lyrics to the song Discipline by Nine Inch Nails. I like the power behind them and how they're sung and I believe I could really make the words kind of, attack or discipline each other while they're being said.



I quite like the use of the camera/3D layers in this video. Especially the way the text is represented as small when the voice/sound is distant and large when it is louder. Also, the way the text bounces and flexes could be useful for my Discipline idea, only perhaps I could make words bounce and push off each other.

More transitions

So far I've been in the process of finding the signage imagery for my Transitions piece. There are a few sites with pages of decent vectorised signs. Now I am in the process of importing them into photoshop and cutting them up into layers of body parts to animate in After Effects.

I have also been experimenting with 3D and cameras in After Effects and I am going to look into animating the camera to sort of, follow the transition of the male figure into the female figure's sign and then into the baby figure's sign, etc.

More animated street signs:



Though my brief won't be including any video manipulation, animation of my figures in the signs might look something similar. Though I hope to make my movements a little more realistic and less, well, cartoony.