As per a previous post where I researched various kinematic typography videos. I have been slowly progressing on my own animation for the song Centuries by Fall Out Boy. I created some basic imagery to put with my animated type and finished the animation for the entire song.
Centuries By Fall Out Boy
I DO NOT OWN THIS SONG
I’ve been looking at and drawing inspiration for my projects from a variety of games with art styles I admire. These art styles lead me onto the artists that have drawn them and the rest of their works.
Joe Harty is an American illustrator also known as Sir-Heartsalot on his Deviant Art profile.
https://sir-heartsalot.deviantart.com
He created the pixel art for the game Enter The Gungeon. A rogue-like dungeon crawler where the aim is to get as many positive upgrades as you can to take on the boss of each floor as you progress towards the end of the dungeon or ‘gungeon’. A lot of his art on deviant art are illustrations of various characters from various games. All of which are very well drawn and exciting to look at. Some of them are lighthearted and humorous.
Victor Moura is an illustrator who was the lead artist for the sprites in the game Terraria.
https://cronus.itch.io, https://twitter.com/CrownoO/
He has created a variety of browser games in both a pixelated art style as well as a cartoon-y art style. Additionally has a lot of illustrations based from various games and their characters. I love a lot of the pixel art he does as the shading and detail on them are impressive.
Chris Bourassa is a creative director and artist for the game Darkest Dungeon.
https://twitter.com/BourassaArt/
Majorly illustration based, his art has a very sketch like quality and is quite dark in theme. He tends to lean towards a darker colour palette to create very atmospheric and detailed images.
For my essay this year I decided to write about how graphics in video games have developed and changed over the years. I wanted to explore how early arcade game graphics like Pong or Space Invaders had developed into modern day, hyper realistic graphics in games. I looked at key games from each decade, starting in the 70s. I researched individual games that were remade, for example Pong in 1972 compared to Danger Ball for PlayStation VR. I also looked at games that were a part of an ongoing series and how the graphics improved from when the first game of the franchise released to the most recent. For example The Elder Scrolls franchise went from very early poloygonal graphics in The Elder Scrolls: Arena. To much better graphics that can almost get lifelike through the use of fan made mods in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
We were given the opportunity to enter the Student Design Awards 2018 competition to create a book cover for any of the three chosen books – Animal Farm, A Brief History of Time or Noughts and Crosses. Only one design was allowed per category.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk/work-with-us/design-award/
For my submission, I chose to do a cover design for Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman. I had a look at a few other cover designs already available to start generating ideas.
I figured using an image of O and X was a key thing to have in my design, but I didn’t want them just sitting there like the first two book covers I looked at had. I liked when the two shapes were combined like in the third cover. With this in mind, along with the template and information provided in the competition I started putting a design together. I liked the orange colour used on the first book cover so I tried including something similar in my own.
I was quite pleased with this but I wanted to know what the design was like in different colours too. As I wasn’t convinced orange was the one I wanted. So I put together red, green, blue and grey scale versions.
I liked the other colours as well but still felt attached to the orange version. It also went the best with the orange penguin books logo. I did however want to make a few small changes to the position of the type for the title and the size of the bubbles on the back cover. I also shrunk the blurbs text size. This was the design I eventually submitted:
I was much happier with this design and it looks a lot neater. Sadly my design was not chosen.
For our study trip we went to Germany and stayed in Berlin (Mitte) at The Generator. While we were there we not only got to explore Berlin but we went to a variety of studios were different designers and illustrators worked and they told us a bit about what they do. The first place we went to however was the Berlin Wall Memorial, on our way to our first studio visit.
The first studio we visited was Tina Bernings. She is an illustrator who does a variety of portraits using water colour. She spoke in depth about the history of the area and the Berlin Wall in relation to her studio building. She then explained to us, her techniques and attitude to her work and career. She showed us a book she’d released years ago called Girls on Cheap Paper and expressed a desire to make another.
The next studio we visited was Patrick Thomas’ who showed us a lot of his work and explained his approach to clients and briefs. He has had a long career in design and enjoys making prints. He also has a growing collection of torn posters. He explained how important it was to be confident in the industry and in your own work. That not everyone is always going to like or understand your work but it doesn’t mean it’s bad.
We also got to talk to Jack Sachs, who came to us as his studio was too small for our group. He spoke about working as a young illustrator/animator and showed us some of his After Effects/ Cinema 4D work. He advised that a good, well designed website with your own domain name is incredibly useful for getting started. It was also worth noting that he said its best to work alongside or around other people as working alone can be demoralizing. Like both visits before him, he reiterated that it is so important to be confident when dealing with clients.
We visited the Urban Nation Gallery as well which was full to bursting with various street art, including a room full of graffiti in which you could contribute.
The last studio we visited was Waltz Binaire – Dancing with Code. A digital artist who combines dancing and coding, claiming that the body can become robotic and coding can become organic. He spoke about how AI is constantly learning and that it can be used to create art as well as for practical tasks. He also had Narcis, a machine that attempted to recognize itself and object around it.
We then visited the East Side Gallery which was an incredibly long wall covered in street art. Despite the cold weather it was worth walking by it.
The first project in which we can do anything. With this self-initiated project we can design anything we want to help identify the type of work we enjoy the most. For me I love animating and gaming. So I wanted to combine the two. I also enjoyed the animated movie poster project we’ve done before and felt like I could make something a whole lot better now. I decided on creating an animated game poster. This meant I could still do some animating while not having to rely entirely on it. I would be able to make some still images for it as well, which would be a nice change, especially after the Re-imagining Narrative project.
I tossed a few ideas around on which game to focus on. There’s a lot I really enjoy but i’m put off slightly by these games and their hyper realistic graphics. I don’t want to have to delve into photography for this project. This narrowed down my choices to a few indie games I like or even looking at some older games. I thought about creating a poster for Portal, but using more cartoon-y graphics but I didn’t feel like I could create an animation for that which would be interesting enough to look at, even more so as it would need to loop.
For my essay this year I have been looking at older games so it seemed like the way to go as I already had quite a bit of information on them. It couldn’t be something too simple as the animation side wouldn’t be interesting but it couldn’t be too complicated either for time restraints. I decided on Space Invaders in the end but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to push myself with this project as I wanted to ensure the animated poster I make this time, is a lot better than the first I’d made last year. After Effects has a basic 3D feature I could play with so I decided that my Space Invaders themed animation would run in a 3D space. This would give me a chance to practice and use what I’ve already learned.
So I’d make a poster adverting Space Invaders with the intent to get people playing older games again and the animated part of the poster would be done in a 3D space. I’d mostly keep to the original graphics style of Space Invaders to make it more authentic. I looked up Space Invaders to confirm the art style and other features, like setting.
It seems an orange planet is a key feature, along with a blue shaded sky. It was also worth noting the design of the logo and the old version of the Taito logo. I also looked up the space invaders themselves in order to get an idea of their design.
I also looked around for some animations people had made for space invaders to give me some more ideas. I found someone who was also working in After Effects
I sat down and got to drawing out my ideas. I also drew out the space invaders themselves to give me an idea on how to do 2D pixel art with depth. At first i’d tried designing it with a different art style to the original. I liked the type but the rest didn’t feel right. I moved on to drawing in the more original style.
From here it was a case of creating the assets I would need for the animation. The space invaders and the tank were not too difficult as they are very simple pixel shapes. The space like background took a little longer to create.
With these made, it was just a matter of putting it all together and getting the animation running smoothly in a simple loop.
As I had time I decided I wanted to make a second poster as well. I looked at some more old arcade games an found an old favourite of mine. Bubble Bobble. This one was not going to be animated in a 3D space as I couldn’t think of a way to crate the animation that allowed this. Instead I wanted it to simply show off the main mechanics in the game, like I did with the Space Invaders poster.
I started however by focusing on the assets i’d need to create. I looked up a few screenshots of the original Bubble Bobble and recreated the characters i’d use.
Once I had everything I needed I started to put my animation together, again going for a smooth loop. This animation ended up being smaller than the Space Invaders one but it was more compact and complicated in the shorter amount of time it ran for, than the other.
For this project, designers and illustrators had slightly different briefs. We all had to take a piece of narrative, a rhyme, myth, legend, fairy tale, e.t.c and recreate it as an animation in our own way. However, designers could only use typography while illustrators could only use image. The animation had to be between 1-3 minutes. When I first received the brief for this project I saw a perfect opportunity to create something horror themed. A lot of myths, legends and fairy tales can be quite scary and I wanted to draw on this. I particularly liked the idea of re-imagining a fairy tale. One fairy tale popped into my head straight away and ended up being the one I focused on. The Gentlemen from the TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
The Gentlemen are a group of ghouls that steal peoples voices so they can’t scream and then go around stealing hearts in order to stay alive. They were invulnerable to harm apart from their one weakness, a human scream. (http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/The_Gentlemen)
To create an animation using only type based on a fairy tale from an episode that had little to no talking would be tricky. Thankfully there’s a rhyme that foretold the arrival of The Gentlemen that I could use. It went as such:
Can’t even shout,
Can’t even cry,
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows,
Knocking on doors,
They need to take seven,
And they might take yours.
Can’t call to mum,
Can’t make a sound,
You’re gonna die screaming,
But you won’t be heard.
The rhyme can also be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIjoHpEa5g
While not a real fairy tale, solely created by the show, it certainly has roots in the nightmare scenario of the dreamer is in danger and can’t make a sound to attract attention.
Within my animation, to make it more interesting than just words on a screen, sound will be incredibly important. My goal is for my animation to be incredibly atmospheric. I also wasn’t overly sure what to do with the background of the animation seeing as I can’t use images. A workaround I thought, could be to have smoke gently moving behind the text. I didn’t want to go overboard with colour either as that would take away the scary aspect of it.
To help, I looked at a few different examples of kinetic typography in a horror context. I found a video that used some text from The Shining:
However I wasn’t a fan of how quick the type moves, it is effective in it’s own way but you can’t always read the text and rely too much on the speech. I don’t want to use a narrative in my own animation as The Gentlemen steal voices. I only want to use atmospheric sound to simulate this.
I also watched one with animated type from a speech in Underworld Rise of the Lycans.
I liked the way the font changed when a word was shouted or more important in the speech. Using different kinds of type is a good way of making something visually appealing without using images. Darker colours and the use of red also seem common in these videos.
I began to sketch out my ideas into a storyboard.
I wanted to start experimenting some more with type on After Effects. I tried multiple different effects and fiddled with the settings to see what I could do and to give me ideas of how it could be useful in my final outcome.
Eventually I ended up with an outcome I was happy with. I had to re render it when I realized the smoke I used in the background was too faint. My animation is sufficiently atmospheric with the free sounds I found to use and while the type is simple, I feel it is effective. I tried to find a balance between putting effects on the type to make it visually appealing while not taking focus away from the sounds.
For the best experience, use headphones with the volume turned up in a darkened room.
Our brief this time was to design a social media app. We had to focus on the idea, function, content and the icon for our app and then provide up to 6 ‘screenshots’ of our app on a mobile device. We could create any kind of app we wanted as long as it had some kinda of social media aspect, as simple as a chatroom or being able to connect with someone who has similar interests via online features.
We went over our hobbies and likes in order to help decide what to base our apps on. I decided to base mine on comedy television shows. To begin with I started looking around at different comedy websites and apps to get an idea of layout, content and colours they tend to use.
I looked at Comedy Central (http://www.cc.com/), Cracked (http://www.cracked.com/) and Chortle (http://www.chortle.co.uk/). Each of these sites are quite similar, especially the layouts of Cracked and Chortle, but the information on each site vary’s slightly. I also had a look over Netflix’s design (https://www.netflix.com) as the app I want to design is more than just a site for information, it would be able to show clips, if not entire episodes/seasons of the shows listed on it. I decided I liked the look of Netflix and of Comedy Central the most, I liked their darker colour palettes. I found that a lot of people were saying that when they thought of comedy they thought of the colour red or of a brick wall because of the stereotypical background for a stand up comic was a brick wall. I decided to play on these ideas in my design. I didn’t want the brick wall as the background for the whole app as it didn’t look good and was distracting. It was however, good for the log in screen and as a splash screen.
I begun to sketch out some ideas for layout and design while thinking about what my app could be called and what I could do as an icon.
As far as initial ideas go I felt this was going quite well. However having large sketches over so many pages was somewhat annoying, so I narrowed down my designs and drew out 5 with a phone template as a border, this gave me a better idea of how the app would actually look.
I liked the name Chortle that the site i’d looked at before had and I wanted to do a similar thing with my app, a synonym of laugh would be simple and effectively get across what my app is. I started listing out synonyms until I came across one that fitted. I settled with Cackle. With the name in mind I tried designing some simple icons to go along with it.
I liked the clapperboard idea as its a simple but iconic image that instantly makes you think ‘film’. It could even make you think of bloopers as a lot of bloopers for shows can include the clapperboard at the start of a take.
From here I took to Photoshop to being putting my app together. I used a phone template and designed my app to look as if it was actually on a phone screen. I also designed the icon I had sketched out before.
We began to look at the history of creativity and technology within design from the 80s. We covered how designs used new technology as it was released and how it influenced their work. At first glance, technology and creativity seem like they should be at odds, one is very scientific while the other is imaginative and artistic. Although an argument could be made that technology also relies on imagination. Eventually both sides have developed far enough to compliment each other and work hand in hand. To an extent that technology needs creativity.
We watched a TED talk that highlighted some strange design ideas that could be a start for future possibilities.
Paola Antonelli is a design and architecture researcher who is also a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In the mid 1980s, computers had begun to be used by designers. The designs were usually a layered and complex aesthetic that was given the term Poststructuralism. The ability to be able to copy and paste open up new creative freedoms. It also drastically sped up the production of digital art and design as personal computers and printers began to be used. It also allowed the designers more room for experimentation.
The editor for the design journal Visual Language – Sharon Poggenpohl understood how much this technology was going to change the way we communicate. She was an enthusiastic supporter of this new technology and encouraged many other designers to get to grips with using computers.
By the early 1990s a wave of criticism and art emerged from the new cyber-culture that had formed thanks to computers. The term CyberFeminism was coined by Sadie Plant, a British cultural theorist, and the Australian art collective VNS Matrix at the same time. It was a crucial moment in time where the connective technology of the internet had begun to become more public. The CyberFeminists saw technology as a way to dissolve sex and gender divisions. They used the internet as a place where woman came together to discuss their similarities and differences.
https://historyofcyberfeminism.wordpress.com/
This form of art is created with the complete or part use of an autonomous system. A system that can determine features of an artwork and develop it itself rather than with human aid. Some say the system represents their own artistic idea while others claim that the system takes on the role of the creator. This is an early example of graphic art that has been computer generated. It is made by John H.Whitney who explains how much potential he sees in the technology.
This kind of generated art is still used in screen savers. Something that is so simple today was a lot more complicated and incredible then.
Another kind of generative art is Op art. its an abstract form of art created in black and white. It typically gives the viewer the impression of movement or hidden images. It could also include swelling, warping, flashing or vibrating patterns. The widely accepted ‘grandfather’ of the Op art movement was a Hungarian-French artist called Vasareli. An art movement in Italy called Arte Progmmata in the 1960s was a futurist movement begun by Bruno Munari who was heavily influence by Vasareli.
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For this brief we have to make some form of typography based/ Spoken word motion graphic using After Effects or Premiere Pro. I decided to create mine in After Effects. This is a year long project and to begin with all we need was some research, a storyboard of our animation and an animatic – the storyboard simply animated. I decided for my project I wanted to make a lyric video to a song. In order to get inspiration for this I looked around at some other lyrics videos found on YouTube. Preferably more complicated ones with animated text.
I looked up some songs I know and like, searching for a lyric video.
The first one I found was Stay Back from The Sixth Lie. A Japanese Band whose songs tend to have a mix of both English and Japanese. The official music video for this song is a lyric video. This is more illustrated than I would like to do, but it is still a way I could go if I decided to.
The next video I found is The Phoenix by Fall Out Boy. The video is fan made with fantastic kinetic typography. This is definitly a video I will be drawing inspiration from. Seeing this has made me consider how I use colour and typefaces in my own work. This isn’t really present in the animatic of my storyboard, but it is most definitly a thing I will be doing in the final animation.
I also looked up a lyric video for a more frantic song – It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by REM. I couldn’t find a nice animated type video as most are just of the lyrics on screen with no animation. However I did find one that took it in a slightly different direction. It’s the the best but rather than using animated type they used various images to illustrate the lyrics. This could be a good thing to remember as it may help me decide on what images to use for what lyrics in my own animation.
Denney Smith 