Kinetic Typography Artistic Reflection

Kinetic Typography Assignment

TGJ20P

Title: Skyscraper

Medium: Flash 2.0 and illustrator CS4

The song I chose was Skyscraper by Demi Lovato. She previously went through an eating disorder and she got a lot of criticism about here weight. She came out with many songs talking about how she won’t let people judge her because of her weight. The idea behind the song I chose is that she is strong like a skyscraper and she isn’t going to let people bring her down. She is happy with who she is.  Although I am now sick and tired of hearing this song I like to relate to it because as a kid I found it very hard to fit in but now I don’t let to let people tear me down because of who I am and what I look like. The whole concept of my design was to have the lyrics of the song build up into a skyscraper and I think my final product came out very well. 

The thing I like most about my final product is how all the words come together to create the skyscraper and although my vision of how the animation didn’t come out exactly as I planned I still think the shape of a skyscraper is clearly visible and easy to identify. If I could change one thing though it would be to have the animation zoomed in at the beginning and then have the final product be revealed at the end for anticipation. I should have asked for help when I first started because I was a little unsure with how to create the effect but this is my first time using this program so I still think I did very well.

As I wrote before my overall concept was to have it build into a skyscraper, but I didn’t just want to have the words show up. I made the words come in at different directions and different speeds depending on what the word(s) was. For one line “like I’m made of” instead of having the same line reappear I had the one line change color to represent the repeated line. I was very happy with this effect. I hoped to make the overall building of the skyscraper more appealing and not feel like it was being dragged on.

I am not very tech inclined so I found using this program difficult at the beginning. What I found most challenging was getting the words to all fit together in the entire skyscraper because I spent about one full class just rearranging the words to create the building so it could be identified as a skyscraper and knowing where and how the words would come in. When I faced these challenges I usually asked for help from another student or my teacher and although the challenges may not have been that difficult to most, for me I felt very satisfied when the whole process was over even though it looked relatively simple. When I figured out how to get the text to fade in/fade out from a helpful tutorial, I was satisfied and was able to recreate the effect again without the tutorial. You can look for the link I posted on the blog.