Design Considerations

I didn’t want to go down the beaten path of making sentences and words move on screen; although parts of my clip does have that. To differentiate my work, yet keeping within the bounds of only using type in the exercise, I decided to make a face with type. My name, Joel, was transformed into a face using different typefaces.

The choice of font for the face was not random. I wanted an ‘e’ that would stand out as it would be the eye and selected a serif font. The ‘o’ for the mouth had to be simple so I chose Helvetica. The ‘j’ was to be the top part of the head and I wanted it to be smooth, a slick hairstyle, so I chose a freehand font. The capital ‘L’ was the nose and I selected a serif typeface that made it prominent but not imposing.

Once the face and mouth movements were settled, I needed to make the clip interest the viewer and tried to inject some humour in it. I did this by having the face misunderstand certain words of the rapid-fire speech of the audio track. This I did with the early ‘pen’ sequence. I also pulled out particular words and made them interact with the face in unexpected ways. The interactions were relevant to the what was being said. For instance ‘repression’ seemed to force the face to duck beneath the screen.

All in all, I enjoyed the exercise. (Note to self: I want to learn how to track images and text on the screen.)

Click to play Kinetic Type clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpTuBg85ynk