Kinetic Typography

Kinetic Typography from Emma Nicholson on Vimeo.

In industry, even if I do not want to be involved in animation, it is important to have a basic understanding of how the artwork is set up so you can work effectively and fluently with animators and other creatives. For example, type is often aligned centrally in animation to avoid any text being clipped off with the variation of screen sizes. When creating simple ten second clips like this, especially with simple little content like type, it is best to split each section up to create three key stages within the animation. This enables an equal flow of content and consistent attention of the viewer. To check if my quote was long enough to fill the ten seconds, a handy trick is to read it out loud at a speed that is natural to you, because that is the pace in which you would want to animate it, it you say it in about ten seconds it is okay to use.

To start with I set up a HD format Illustrator document, then create three art boards that will be the three main segments of the animation, these boards is what you show to a client so they can get an idea to how it will progress. I then set all the type in each segment. And once my Illustrator file was complete I imported it into my composition.

I then animated some transitions between key words using position and rotation key frames. I added some easy ease in and out for a little natural bounce. I also added a tiny amount of motion blur to make the movement look that little bit more natural. There was one point where I wanted all the elements to rotate around one anchor point, so to do this I created a null object layer and applied all the words parent as this umm object, so when I moved the null object, the rest of the words moved with it around the anchor point I created for the null object. This was helpful when creating my transitions between the three segments. I also experimented with some of the pre-set effects in AfterEffects however none of them suited the simple style so I decided not to include them.

I then tweaked some areas that were not the speed or position I liked and rendered my video and exported it at lower quality for the web.