This project was an assignment from my motion design class. The assignment topic was Kinetic Typography, which is moving type. The task was to animate a piece of audio and to design the typography in an expressive way. The audio and words I used were taken from a vintage radio soap opera. Here is a little sample of what it sounds like:
The process was the same for every motion design project we had. We started out with a storyboard to convey our animation ideas.
We then made a mood board. The piece of audio and writing I chose was very moody and melodramatic. It also had a time-warped quality to it, which made me inspired by space and trippy illusions with color and light.
I want to highlight a few isolated clips from the sequence. In the first, I wanted the text to mimic the action. I played around with colored lights to demonstrate invisible and unseen. I expanded the word “Living” to show that it can grow, and animated “whispering” as if it were actually whispering. In the second clip to play on the past, I blurred out the typography in slow motion. And in the last clip, I again played with colored lights to convey the shadows and the movement behind the meaning of the words.
You might have noticed the texture throughout. This is a radio play from the ‘40s so it is of another time. And it feels that way. The static is palpable in the audio clip. I wanted to allude to that static noise through adding texture. To do this, I ended up using an old scanned super 8 film I had and added it on top of my entire animation. Here’s an example of that footage. It worked well because each text segment ended up feeling so different, adding this textured footage throughout tied all of the sentences together into one.
To watch the full sequence with the audio click here or watch below. Enjoy!