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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Typography Meets Country Music

June 17, 2013 by Jan Herman

Hat’s off to the designer whoever that is. The kinetic typography put me in mind of the clever card sequence in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan, “Don’t Look Back.” The design is more ingenious now, and of course the technology is far more sophisticated. But you get the idea.


CLICK FOR THE VIDEO [Steve Martin & Edie Brickell: ‘Love Has Come For You,’ 2013]

As to the stylish use of those primitive hand-written cards 46 years ago, Pennebaker says: “Dylan came up with the idea of cutting a lot of things written down on pieces of paper. We didn’t think about what you’re gonna do with them. But he had these things on cards, and he said, ‘Is that a good idea for the film?’ And I said, ‘It’s a terrific idea.'”


CLICK FOR THE VIDEO. [Bob Dylan: ‘Don’t Look Back,’ 1967]

Postscript: June 20 — A YouTube video “Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography — Language” explains a lot. Marija Penezić is not the first to post it on YouTube, but her posting has no commercial interference, thank god, and there is an explanation of the technical details of the design. What I don’t understand is that she seems to be taking credit for the video, which as far as I can tell is not true.

A British-born, Australian-trained artist by the name of Matthew Rogers designed and created the video and uploaded it nearly three years ago. He wrote:

Using the wonderful words of acclaimed writer, actor and allround know it all (I mean that in the best of ways) Stephen Fry, I have created this kinetic typography animation. If you like what you hear you can download the rest of the audio file from Mr. Fry’s website. stephenfry.com and then go to the audio and video section at the top of the page and look for the file entitled language. You can also find the file on iTunes by searching the name ‘Stephen Fry’s Podgrams’.

I loved this particular essay on language and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to make my first kinetic typography video. I hope you like it and even if you dont I would like to heard what you think in the comments section. Also I know that at points the audio does not match the text so you do not have to write that. It is because I copied the transcript off of Stephen’s website and it was not 100% exactly what he said and i did not notice until I was well underway. However these cases are few and far between.

Just in case you were wondering, the programs I used to make this were all by Adobe. Mostly After Effects but also Flash and Illustrator. Flash for the changing background colour transitions and illustrator for putting the words in to the shape of ‘language’ before loading it into After Effects to animate.

Holy moly! Put up enough blogposts and you forget what you posted. This, for example, Typographically Speaking, which I embedded from Vimeo on October 29, 2010, a day before before Rogers uploaded it to YouTube.

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Filed Under: Art, Media, Movies, Music

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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