Portal 2 | Cave Johnson Lemons Rant

The audio I used for the typography assignment was a 30 second rant about lemons by a character from the video game “Portal 2.” The character in the game is a bit crazy, and often says strange but humorous things like in the rant I used.

What I like about the final product the most is how I was able to animate the text in many different ways, making it more interesting to watch. Instead of just making the text appear according to the talking, I made it move across the screen, squash and stretch, and change colour in various ways. One of the things I would want improved about my kinetic typography is how smoothly the text moved. For the most part, the text was moving fluently and without choppiness. There were some parts where it seemed awkward, like at 0:21 when the text was changing colour, but did it in a rather sporadic fashion. To fix that, I probably could have finely-tuned the tweening for the colour changes.

In terms of visual design, I wanted to keep it simple because if I had multiple fonts, text colours, and background designs, it would be hard to focus on the text. That is why I kept the background black throughout the whole video so the bright yellow text would stand out easily. I kept the font (avenir heavy) the same as well, and only changed the colour in some parts where the colour change was the main focus of the typographic animation. I also had some moving symbols in my animation. I kept the shapes simple too, because if you watch the whole animation you will find that any design more than simple would be too much for the viewer to process.

The biggest technical challenge in making the kinetic typography was the timing. I can usually make audio match the visuals in a video precisely, but I found it hard to do in Flash. The reason is because in other visual/audio editors I am able to slow down the playback temporarily so I can match the sound and images. In Flash I could only play back the animation at full speed, which meant I had to rewind it many times in order to get the timing right.

The only thing I could use to help me with the timing of the audio and visuals was moving the marker over the audio and listening to snippets of it and looking at the sound waves of the recording and matching the words with them.