Narrative Motion Graphics

1. Narrative Motion Graphics Lesson C: Adobe After Effects Text Design Tools and an Intro to Basic Text Motion Tools

2. Welcome to week 3! We have just completed our introductory two week unit on After Effects and shape animation. Learning a new software, especially one as complex as After Effects, always has a steep learning curve. This is especially challenging for everyone at the start, when you are still trying to learn the language and logic of the program– how it expects you to think in order to communicate with it easily. Learning new parts usually gets a lot easier around weeks 3 and 4 as you get more comfortable with the fundamental layout and tool concepts. Please be patient with yourself, and email us often for help! This week we start a new two-week unit on text design and animation. We will start with a week where homework is only design work, so you can take a break from animation and just think in terms of design as it relates to narrative.

3. Designing with Text Graphic design with text encourages experimentation with style (“font”), size, color, kerning, line spacing, non-uniform scale, stroke, depth, and associated lines. With these tools graphic designers can create impactful, recognizable, and meaning-rich images with text. Film Logos are carefully crafted to prepare viewers for the movie experience: how it will feel to watch the film. Consider the grunge of Apocalypse Now, as if steeped in swamp muck, and the fractured shapes of The Matrix, as if the logo is halfway through a computer glitch. Discuss with a neighbor: What do you think is being communicated by a few of the others? What cultural or political period is evoked (or defined) by these shapes and their treatment?

4. Designing with Text Company logos are designed to sell product, or confidence in the product. They can try to evoke nostalgia, like Coca Cola’s elegant script, make us think about the origins of computers, like IBM’s scanline machine-display , or consider the elongated forms of runway models, as seen in just about any couture fashion label. Discuss with the class: What do you think is being communicated by a few of the others? What cultural or political period is evoked by these shapes and their treatment?

5. Designing with Text Baseball franchises spend a tremendous amount on their branding. They want to connect with their fans, evoke a particular time and place, create a sense-memory that will drive engagement. Discuss with the class: What do these rival logos try to evoke that is shared, and what do they do that is distinct?

6. Designing with Text This two-week unit is about designing spatial arrangements of text and then animating into those spaces, timed (and related) to audio. This week you will choose a 30-second audio clip (a song, story, or speech) and create static, richly designed hierarchies of text from the words in the audio (or which create commentary on the audio). Consider a controlled variety of colors, fonts, sizing and spacing. Controlled = thoughtfully limited: too much variety can just become noise, like a word cloud. You want to create meaning. Next week you will animate the appearance and interaction of these text elements in After Effects, inspired by the arrangements from this week. We like to call animated text TEXTACY, after Chris and Trish Meyer. TO BE CLEAR: This week, DESIGN your text-rich film. Next week, ANIMATE your text rich film.

7. Designing with Text As I said, we are building HIERARCHIES: Some text is more important, and gets more space, more contrast, more detail, and more a prominent position in the arrangement. Note the biggest words in the image to the right, and how they are also the most prominent in shade and detail. In animation, this importance would be emphasized and paired with more motion time and more build-up and impact in the motion quality. Perhaps each letter in Love and Ends appears and then the curls would draw themselves out of the L and S while the other words grew around them. Perhaps bigger words took their time to fade away as well, to linger on the eye. In the following example, note which blocks are given more emphasis with size, style, block-shading, and position.

9. Designing with Text Positive vs Negative Space: Consider the shapes you make with your text, and the shapes they carve into the space around them. The objects you create we call “positive space” and the less detailed or empty area around them we call “negative space”. Negative space is critical in a composition for giving the eye someplace to pause and rest, and for creating contrast with the main content. The shapes we make out of our negative space can carry meaning, themselves. Consider this woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai. Like many Japanese prints, the shapes created around the forms are as important as the forms themselves. Turn this wave upside down, and we get a new wave:

12. Let’s watch some examples of kinetic text animation, remembering our four visual relationships with audio: Exemplar:The visual is a clear example of the text, requiring no effort by the viewer. Explorative:The visuals go beyond the text, taking the visual story further. Parallel:The visuals tell a different but related story, often a metaphor. Subversive:The visuals undercut what is being said, often with humorous or horrific intent. 

13. Student Example: Mark Mayer: Donald Trump Tweet, read by Mark Hamill, in Joker voice

14. Student Example: Thomas Narro: “Tyranny” Speech from the film Pulp Fiction

15. Student Example: Alexandra Bandow: “Humor” Speech from the film Pulp Fiction

16. Student Example: Stephanie Plant: “Break Out” rally speech

17. Student Example: Michael Davis: “Hip Hop” clip from song “The Healer” by Erykah Badu

18. Student Example: Michael Davis: “Hip Hop” clip from song “The Healer” by Erykah Badu NOTE: You are not required to show your ideas for animating the text in these frames, but you are welcome to include unobtrusive notes, like Michael did with red (a color not present in his actual designs, hand-drawn to be even more distinctive, and numbered to show order). What would be the benefit to you for adding motion notes?

19. AE Digital Text Adobe and our operating systems offer a LOT of installed fonts, and you can add to the fonts on your machine by downloading them from reputable websites. Install before turning on After Effects. You will need to bring the new font installer with you anywhere you want to work on the AE file: keep it in your project folder. In the After Effects top toolbar, Click on the [T] icon to click and type into your viewport. If we click-and-drag in the viewport, we can also create a constraining block for your text, which is useful if we want a contained paragraph. We adjust most text properties in the “Character” and “Paragraph” panels. If the Character panel is not visible in your project, open it in the Windows menu.

20. Basic After Effects Text Animation 1 There is no After Effects motion homework due this week, but let’s start practicing some text animation tools for next week: [Cmd/Ctrl]+[t] or hit the Text tool button for text. Hold the button down to choose horizontal or vertical text. Click in the viewport to start text or click-drag to create range box for text. There are 4 main ways to animate text (other than adding Effects): • Use basic Layer Transforms to animate the entire text block, and Parenting pick-whip to create interactions. • Keyframingthe Source Text option in the Timeline layer. This offers no tweening (just on and off) but can be effective in limited cases, to suddenly switch between font properties. • Animate Along a Path: • Select an existing text layer, use the pen tool to draw a wavy line mask across the viewport. • Under Text > Path Options > Path click [none] and choose the Mask. • Animate movement with First Margin, and try other settings, like changing More Options > Anchor Point Grouping from each letter to entire words. • We can also animate the Mask Path under Mask options!

21. Basic After Effects Text Animation 2 • Text Layer Animateoptions: Click the little Animate button (to the right of the Text layer name) to choose an options for Animating Parts of Text. The basic process for animating these functions are: • Create a new Text layer and open the Twirly • Hit [Animate > ] to apply a function (try starting with Scale). • Set the value of that function (scale much bigger) • Keyframe: • Range Selector > Offset (with start=0 and end=100) to simply move the effect through the timeline (good for single words). • Range Selector > Start and End percentages to decide when and where that function applies (good for sentences; under Advanced, try switching “based on” between characters and words.). • Once the start and end are animated, we can hit [Add >] for additional functions that will affect that animated range (Try adding Rotation, Position, Blur). Note: Opacity typically needs its own range controls, as it is the reverse.

22. Basic After Effects Mask Animation Use Masks to help animate visibility in After Effects: • Select a Text layer. • With the Layer selected, create a mask, like a Rectangle Mask • Animate the position of the mask by keyframign the Masks > Mask# > Mask Path to reveal or hide the text. • This can be used in combination with Text-specific animation tools to create a richer reveal or disappearance than just transparency alone. AFTER EFFECTS REMINDERS: TIMELINE SHORTCUTS: • Choose Start and End points: Move the Timeslider to the desired time, then [Alt]+[ [ ] to make that the START of the clip, or [Alt]+[ ] ] to make that the END of the clip. • Also, selecting the track and simply hitting [ or ] moves the start or end of the track to the current time. • Duplicate a selected layer by hitting [Cmd/Ctrl]+[d]. • To split a layer at the current time, hit [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[d]

23. Introduction to Photoshop: Text work Adobe PhotoshopIs an industry standard tool for design, painting, and animation. Made by the same company as After Effects, they share a lot of the same language and systems. For example, both include the concept of layers, have Blending Mode options for layer interaction, and are limited to 255 levels of shading value: • [Cmd/Ctrl]+[n] to create a new project. Set size 1280x720 and resolution 72ppi. • Layers panel: create a new layer, set opacity, blending modes, Adjustment Layer, Masking. Duplicate a layer [Cmd/Ctrl]+[j]. • Tools: Move [v], Marquee [m], Brush [b], Erase [e], Paint Bucket [g] • Making text, and Character vs Paragraph options. • Transforming content: hit [t] and move / rotate / scale (but keep the layers as text). • Working with color (hue vs value). • Adding texture (with blending modes and masks). • Using folders to organize sections of a project. • Saving a PSD, and saving each visible folder as a PNG.

24. Notes on Accessibility For this assignment, I ask that you consider issues of accessibility for a color blind audience. People who are color blind can be left out of visual experiences like graphic design, film, or games when those media don’t account for color VALUES. Note these 2 color images look similar in diversity: But when made grayscale, the first still appears to have distinct shapes, while the other is solid gray. This is because the second image was created with varied color HUES but no change in VALUE, by simply moving up the color bar. The colors chosen for the first image not only had different hues, but also different values, by moving vertically in value-saturation square. The result is a richer image for everyone, and a readable one for the color blind (NOTE: people withcolor blindness are usually only blind to a couple of colors).

25. HOMEWORK 3 Due on Piazza hw3 an hour before class next week: Project 1B: TEXTACY #1: Choose 30 seconds of a recorded, song, story or speech, or something you can read in about 30 seconds. Design 5 screens in After Effects or Photoshop (1280x720), to arrange your text in graphically impactful ways that relate to the audio in one or more of our four methods: Exemplar, Explorative, Parallel, or Subversive. Use a folder for each screen, and build a hierarchy of sizes. Consider how font styles, colors, spacing, kerning, angle, and lines (shapes) contribute to the mood you convey at different parts of your text. Save the After Effects AE or Photoshop PSD and save each screen as PNGs. Post the PNGs as images to Piazza, along with citation and link for the chosen audio (author and reader/singer).