Final Kinetic Typography Piece

Here is my final animation, and although I don’t believe it to be my strongest piece of animation to date, it’s something I’m undoubtedly proud of.

Experiments - Kinetic Typography

What I visualised on paper, I wanted to make sure that I was able to create in onscreen.

Here are some experiments/attempts at animating and just generally starting to put things together:

 

 

Vector Images - Kinetic Typography

I had finalised my storyboard and the style of the final animation, and although it was a kinetic type piece I still wanted to add some visual reference to the animation.

Here are all the vector images I intended to use:
 

 

Storyboard to Kinetic Typography

I did a bit of research on the Internet and found an existing piece of kinetic typography to the very same quote.
 

This can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_nuwm252I

 

I found the animation to be so strong visually that when I came for me to start putting my ideas down on paper, it was strongly influenced by this existing animation. This made it very challenging, but I was adamant that I wanted to try and put my own stamp on things.

This is my completed storyboard, and although there is still reference to this original animation, I tried my best to do it my way.

 

 

Typeface to Kinetic Typography

The second part to this semesters work was to produce a piece of kinetic typography using the typeface I had created.

 

I wanted to find piece of audio that would go well with the typeface that was created. After scouring the Internet I came across a Bruce Lee quote, from his short lived TV series ‘Longstreet’ which was aired back in 1971.

Here is the typed transcript of the bit of audio I wanted to extract to animate the text to:

“If you try to remember you will lose

Empty your mind
Be formless
Shapeless
Like water

Now you put water into a cup

It becomes the cup
Put it into a teapot
It becomes the teapot

Now water can flow

Or creep
Or drip
Or crash

Be water my friend” – Bruce Lee

Because the quote was taken out of a conversation, I found that the audio suddenly stopped and just didn’t sound right. So I searched the Internet and found some royalty free white noise which I could edit into the background and have the audio come to a smooth stop.

 

Final Typeface Design

I named it 'Pipes', as I felt that it just when with the style of the font.

 

The outlines of each glyph were created in Illustrator and the grids made it very easy to create perfect curves. It was then transferred into Fontographer, where it was scaled and aligned.
 

I found that using Fontographer was one of the hardest parts of this task. A great piece of software that it is, I still found that sometimes it wouldn't let me align a glyph properly and every time I saved the project, each glyph would change position and scale.
 

The design was then outputted in TrueTypeface (TTF) and OpenType (OTF) format, for installation on both Mac and Windows.
 

'Pipes' By Zi

 

Pipes - Lowercase

 

Pipes - Uppercase

 

Pipes - Numbers & Symbols

 

Pipes - Full Typeface

 

Final Typeface Sketches

All the designs I had created on paper, were in a sans serif style.

So I decided to do a few in a serif style and much preferred it.
 

This is the final typeface design, including Lower and Upper Cases as well as Numbers and Symbols.
 

The design had a lot of curves so I made a curved template out of card and used it to draw out the curves of each glyph.
 

 Lowercase
 

 Uppercase
 

 Numbers & Symbols

 

Experimental Typeface Designs

Another way, in which I like to let my creativity flow, is just to mess around a little and create drafts in Adobe Photoshop.

 

These are just a random selection of designs I did, where I translated the grids on paper to the grids on screen and tried to stick by these grids.
 

 

Initial Typeface Designs Sketches

The first part of this semester work was to create a typeface and these are just a few sketches and designs created in the early stages, just to get a feel of designing type.

 

I tried to keep it quite clean and simple because I didn't want to over complicate things when I would later take it in to Adobe Illustrator and then Fontographer.