Here’s my animation using Adobe After Effects of the 1537 poem “To a Sick Damsel (A une damoyselle malade),” finished for a class assignment in kinetic typography. Really proud of how this turned out!
For Christmas, friends gave me Hofstadter’s book “Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language” (BasicBooks, 1997). The book’s summary at Amazon.com nicely sums up its wit and beauty in discussing the art of translation and a whole host of related issues.
”Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter … got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once.In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot’s poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge. …
Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.
Screenshot of the ending images of my “To A Sick Damsel” kinetic typography video. Credit: Cori Faklaris
Absurdly proud of having made this! A classmate provided the MP3 audio recording, then we created vector typography layers in Illustrator and brought everything into After Effects to create the kinetic motion effects.
“When You Wish Upon A Star” still from video. Credit: Cori Faklaris
For this project done for my Foundations of Digital Production class at IUPUI, I had to demonstrate 1) knowledge of how to implement green screen effects and 2) effective creation of motion graphics. It’s pretty short.
The green screen effect was the easy part. I used a still of a stormy field for the backdrop for a keyed sequence shot with a girl’s head and shoulders against a green background.
For the motion graphics, I then added the sun-like object and brand and tag titles animated to rise and appear to the left side. I added a dark-to-light and blur-to-focus effect on the still to complement the otherworldly vibe.
