Anti Bullying Animation & Spoken Word

A friend of mine showed me this amazing spoken word animation on YouTube and I instantly wanted to watch more videos like this.
First I'll talk about the animation in this video:
-the animation is very relax with calm colors but also has a serious tone to it
-without audio you understand the story
-the drawings are cartoony and engaging
-great transitions
-typography is used and matches the audio

Story:
This video has a very powerful message, it talks about being bullied and what that does to a person.
The poet has a very soothing voice that makes it easy to listen to and understand. The music added in at about a 1:30 is also fits perfectly. It sets the tone and mood for this part of the video. The music, the words, the art..all makes you feel like you are in the shoes of the poor person who is getting bullied. The story is real and is a situation that a lot of people can relate to.

Enjoy

The Art of Drowning

The Art of Drowning

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds. 

This depressing yet beautiful poem written by Billy Collins has been read by many of us. "Many of us" tragically did not include me until today, but poetry and I rarely got along in elementary school you see. I'm slowly catching up. Anyways, I came across this poem after watching a short animated film by Diego Maclean:

This two minute film, like its source, is very strait forward. The poem and film both match a style of raw simplicity that I find really impressive. After looking more into it I found Diego Maclean's personal website which features an awesome opening reel.

http://www.diegomaclean.com/

Billy and Diego are both very talented artists and their collaboration worked seamlessly. Making animations that coincide with poetry seems like a great stimulus for a project idea. Sadly, animation is no quick process and I may have to wait until winter break to tackle something like this. Damn, this material has gotten me into a really sad yet realistic mindset. 

Poetry Fuses with Motion Graphics Underground

As a way to repay the London commuters for putting up with all the delays and repairs as they prepare for the Olympics this summer, the London Underground tube system has developed short videos that will be playing in their stations. The videos all contain a poem that is aided by a short motion graphics animation. The project is called "Words in Motion" and will be playing for two weeks, it's being sponsored by Smile for London. They are hoping to renew an interest in poetry and writing through interesting visual cues; the animations also act as a way to catch commuters attention. The writings are by famous writers and a few have come through amateur submissions while the animations were done by some of the leading English animation companies. These top animators transformed them into 20 second typographic films.

An article in Stash Magazine noted that the artists were given no information about the prose when they selected which one to animation. This blind form of art ensured a more emotional engagement, as well as more democracy, for the artist about the animation. The aim is to produce inspiring and surprising work.

The sampling of the videos that they've put online have aspects of some of the things we have looked at for class. The second one (containing the alliteration) is one of the typography videos that mixes a word starting with c (shown in the middle) with a background pertaining to that word that seems to spread out of the word itself. All the videos will have a different style that mirrors the mood of the poem or literary piece.

SfL: Word In Motion Teaser from Smile for London on Vimeo.

Smile for London is also responsible for other art movements and projects that include visual animations. Here is a video that aired around last year as part of one of their campaigns.

Liam Brazier from Smile for London on Vimeo.

A video on vimeo that contains all of the animations (running about 18 minutes) can be found here.

I thought I'd focus on typography for this post because of our assignment for class. After reading though some previous posts on typography on this blog, a recent viral video came to mind. A lot typography videos I've seen are almost always purely digital but the video that came to my mind was actually a cool combination of typography with live-action video.

I don't exactly agree with this video but I appreciate how it used typography to enhance the message they were sending out. It's a great example of how seemingly simple animations can make a video really powerful. After browsing through the website of the video's production company, I found out this video was made with the Final Cut Pro suite, although I'm sure it can be done in Adobe After Effects as well.