06: Visual Design for Print and Screen: Kinetic Typography Part 2

Reflection

This week, I enjoyed watching the brief documentary about Saul Bass and his experience creating animated title sequences. The ones I found particularly interesting were the title sequences that were small prequels to the movies that they introduced; for example, the title sequence for The Big Country followed a man riding his horse all through an empty plane towards the small country town that the movie begins in. This title sequence cleverly established the setting and emotion of the movie without dialogue or leading text. I also found it interesting that Saul broke the conventions for title sequences in many different ways. For instance, the West Side Story title sequence played only after the movie finished, in order to give the audience time to recover from and reflect on the dramatic ending of the movie. I appreciated hearing Saul Bass’ perspective about title sequence design, and it’s importance in the world of movies.

I also watched the Youtube tutorial about Kinetic Typography in AE. I think watching this video was very useful for me in that I was able to review some of the techniques that we discussed last week in class, while also getting a sneak peek into a few useful tips that I will probably use in the creation of my own project. I plan to rewatch the video again as I begin working on my own project, just to refresh my understanding of how to smoothly implement kinetic typography in After Effects.

This Week

This week I worked on creating my first draft in After Effects. I created the frames in the video in Illustrator, both the sketched frames I submitted last week and frames for the time in between. The frames I made are not exactly how I’d like them to look in my final draft of the project, but I hope they provide a good foundation for my project moving forward.

You can view the first draft of my project here.