Sarah Bates : What are you trying to talk about?: INSPIRED

BRIEF: You are required to select and record a piece of spoken word between 10 - 20 seconds in length which deals with the theme of inspiration. This dialogue can be from an interview with a creative practitioner talking about an aspect of their practice that you find inspiring or talking about someone who has inspired them. It can be about the making of an inspiring piece of work from within a range of creative practices which you find interesting. For this project you will be using digital and analogue motion graphic tools to generate studies in kinetic typography in response to sound and more specifically speech. You can use animation, stop frame, film and techniques from other fields to help complete the brief. Your final outcome should be a dynamic and engaging designed motion graphic response in the form of a 10 - 20 second quicktime movie.

So firstly i wrote a list of blogs and designers that i wanted to research into:

I then narrowed my choices down to 3 which included Michael Bierut talking about the typeface Helvetica, Erik Spiekermann talking about being a typo-maniac and Dave Droga talking about the style of design he likes. After getting feedback from the class, it was decided that i would move forward with the Michael Bierut clip.
I cant get it to upload the clip at the mo...so this is what he says....
No smiling fakery. Just a beautiful big glass of ice cold coke. The slogan underneath, 'its the real thing.' Period. coke. Period. In Helvetica. Period. Any questions? of course not. drink. coke. Period.

The next step was to research into Michael Bierut's work. Below are a few examples which show his simple typographic style.

Before i began to plan out my storyboard, we had a quick tutorial on using Adobe After Affects, this gave me a basic idea of how the typographic imagery could be moved around the page.

The style of my storyboard reflects Michael Bierut's simple, typographical style. He uses black and white and quite simple layouts. He is very bold, clear and concise when speaking his words. As this is a typographical motion graphics project i wanted to let the words show the imagery.

My original storyboard had a white background and i had taken what Michael Bierut was saying much more literally. For example i used the word 'period' instead of zooming into the full stop and i used the words 'any questions...of course not' instead of having a question mark and then a cross going through it. After speaking to my tutor - i developed my storyboard into a less literal piece. I tried to make the typography form the imagery and to let the movement reiterate what Michael Bierut is saying about Helvetica.