Type animation
In this weeks afternoon Thursday process and production session with Sara we created an animation in tribute to a font. The task was to pick a font and create a ten second animation that included the font, facts about the font for example different kinds of the font and visuals and audio to match.
At home I looked through some fonts on my laptop and came across the Bauhaus font. I decided to use this as we had learnt about Bauhaus a few months ago in a lecture and straight away came up with an idea because I knew facts about it. Wassily Kandinski went to Bauhaus and circulated a questionnaire asking people to fill in a triangle, square and circle with the primary colours red, yellow and blue. He did this to find a universal correspondence between form and colour. He coloured the square red, triangle yellow and the circle blue. I decided that the animation would include the yellow triangle, red square and blue circle from Bauhaus to connect the font with the design school. I created some slides on Illustrator before the lesson to prepare. The slides included the font and the shapes, as well as design layout. I downloaded the the light, medium and bold version of the font onto my memory stick and then downloaded them on to my mac in the studio so I could use them.
I set the background on Aftereffects and then began to paste the writing on and animate them. The animation starts with the word Bauhaus coming into the center from the top and the 'sans serif font' gliding in under it. I then thought it would be cool to duplicate the word Bauhaus and make it unravel from the original word and for the words to be in the Bauhaus colours. It took a while to figure out how to do this but I am happy with the end results. The style of this reminded me of the designer Lance Wyman due to the colours and font.
My next aim was to showcase the three styles of the font; light, medium and bold. I decide to make them enter onto the page one by one from the right and staggered. I did this because I wanted to animate the triangle, square and circle to bounce down the page off of the words, as if they were stairs. Sara helped me do this as it is quite an advanced animation for the level I am currently at but I am happy with how it turned out. I drew a path for the shape and then added points onto the path that I edited to make it bounce off the words in the desired points. I also wanted them to rotate to improve the tumbling effect. It was difficult to attempt to make them bounce seamlessly and not look blocky.
I then chose some music to add onto the animation. At first I chose an instrumental number but when I added it and played it, it did not fit so I went back onto the website and chose a song from the funk section. I think it works well with the video because its playful and fun which compliments the bright colours and shapes on my animation. Watch the final video (posted on Vimeo) below!
