What's Your Type?
For this project, the idea was to choose and select a word and create a following animation that suits it. After coming up with ideas for the word, create the typography by hand lettering the word in Adobe Illustrator. Create the animation to be around ten to fifteen seconds long and feature strong animation and design principles. I first began by creating a bunch of ideas for the word and its possible animation.
Word Concepts
After a little brain storming, I had my eyes set on "Music" as the word of my choice. I figured I could do something really cool with the typography and overall animation. The initial idea was to take the word and have it transform or morph into sound waves and bars using a mix of scaling, color changes, position, and masks. I then took the word and created a storyboard of the animation I would make.
Story Boards
1-6
7-12
After writing out and planning the animation, the word would scale and stretch into moving bars as the music note would turn into the audio wave shapes. The bars and wave would move in tandem with each other changing colors in a gradient of the rainbow. Then, the word would snap back into form on the last frame. I then took the word into Illustrator to hand letter the asset.
Typography
Once I lettered the word in Illustrator and put them on layers, it was time to export into After Effects for the animation section. I tried to follow the storyboard pretty closely, except I was able to create a ghost trial effect that would follow the word. I used a noise and dust and scratches effect to create a more textured background and continued to animate until I had a strong proof of concept.
Proof of Concept
Proof 1
The proof of concept received good feedback, and so I continued to build on the ideas I had set forward. I continued animating and morphing the bars while adding a color change gradient to the music note to help add separation from white on white. Next, I rendered out the next version and felt it had become much better with a couple more changes.
Test Render 1
Test Render 1
After seeing how much progress I made, I wanted to continue to work on the bars being more visually interesting instead of flat. I chose to use a scale and loop progression as well as lengthen the video by a couple seconds. I then also added in sound design such as a house music track and matched the animation timing as best I could to the song's beat. I was pretty proud of the final product and felt it reached a level of professionalism.
Final Product
Adding a comprehensive and up beat song choice really allowed for the bars and the moving to become so much more cohesive and made sense as the video without music felt visually appealing but lacking in full engagement. Thus, I was super proud of how the tweaks, music, and all the elements came together to create a polished piece.
