14/02/15
As part of the Video module in Creative Multimedia, I am undertaking a kinetic text project. This basically means "pick a song and make a moving lyric video". After evaluating an interesting selection of songs, I wittled it down to
- Slick Rick's Chlidren's Story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjNTu8jdukA)
- Tiger Lillies' Bully Boys (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhrGspR0yQo)
Both of these songs certainly offer interesting thoughts. They are both a bit mad, which I like. I chose Bully Boys in the end. I really liked the mayham and chaos the lyrics suggested. One of my first thoughts was "Pythonesque". In other words - the song has a humour to it which is silly, unpredictable and fast paced.
This song by the Tiger Lillies is from the 1998 musical Shockheaded Peter, which itself is based on a German children's book known as Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffman. Looking at the list of stories in that, it is clear that Bully Boys is based on "The Story of the Black Boys" where Saint Nicholas dips three boys in black ink who are bullying another boy. Bully Boys follows a similar structure.
Style frame 1 - Inspired by the Pythonesque element of the song
"Silly bully boys" is a prominent line in the song.
"Silly bully boys" is a prominent line in the song.
Style frame 2 - one of the opening lines in the song "One fine summer's day went out"
The words are rays rotating around the sun.
The words are rays rotating around the sun.
Style frame 3 - "Three little corpses, 1 2 3"
Style frame 4 - "he was giant, through and through"
My second Monty Python reference with the giant foot stomping. It works with the word 'giant'.
So there are some style frames I created. I also have plenty of sketches done but I am a silly man who keeps forgetting to scan them. They'll be here whenever I do that.
17/02/15
Proof of concept video
Here is my proof of concept video, based on one of the style frames above. The biggest fight I had with this clip was deciding on colours and fonts, rather than actual graphics or text direction. The idea for the word "dead" is the shove that word, which is a shocking word itself, right in your face. As for the colour scheme, I created it on coolors.co.
23/02/15
Here is the next short video I have produced. It features the first two lines in the song.
06/03/15
Update: I have completed lines 1 to 6 in the song as well as the lines in the 7 second concept above. More to follow. I'll chip away at little bits each day.
11/03/15
After learning about a lack of version/platform compatibility, I had to redo lines 5 and 6. I did this as part of my first 2 hour challenge. I also did the next two lines. Below is a video of the first 8 lines.
So between this and the proof of concept clip I have just over 30 seconds of video done. Basically a quarter of the song, woohoo! Things look better than I expected.
01/04/15
This video has about one minute of new kinetic text for the song, it continues where the previous video finished. I think it's coming along nicely but a couple of places could do with a little polishing I think. There's around 50 second to go which shouldn't be too difficult as some lines start to repeat.
13/05/15
Final update before the deadline:
In truth I got all the lyrics in a few weeks ago which was great. It was made easy because the last few lines were just repeating each other. My final touch is to add in opening credits detailing the artist, song name and my name. I could have added more to it, I feel, yet getting a lot of it done weeks in advance allowed me to put focus on other projects. Either way, something would have lost out.
*final render will appear here when ready*
