Design Hero: Video
Project Description: This video should be consistent with your poster and booklet but will use motion, time and sound. You will write a script and storyboard your idea before executing it. You will gather and curate your subject’s voice (through interviews, lectures and existing videos/films) which will act as the “spine” of your video. You will also use typography, images, information graphics, color, music and other sound effects to give your piece depth, excitement and resonance.
For the final part of the Design Hero project, we were tasked with creating a video/animation about our design hero.
When thinking about what the video could afford and what was I could explore in the video that I could not explore in the rest of my projects, I wanted to have my video demonstrate who Weingart was as an educator. In my other projects, I focus a lot on his work and his design philosophies but I never provided information about him in the classroom.
Audio
When I was down in the letterpress studio, I learned that Terry Irwin, a professor here at CMU Design took classes with Weingart when she was pursuing her masters at the Basel School of Design. I was fortunate enough to be able to get an interview with her, and cut the audio from the interview down for the audio to my video.
When considering what story I wanted to tell with the audio, Terry was able to offer a lot of information about Weingart’s impact at Basel, and his character. Thus, I cut down my audio to inform the audience about what made Weingart so special and how his vision lead a movement in Swiss Design, as well as find a way to portray Terry’s experience studying under Weingart. Terry spoke about Weingart in a very enthusiastic and thoughtful way, and I wanted to somehow show her respect for Weingart in my video.
Storyboarding
For the storyboard, a lot of my ideas revolved around the concept of contrast and comparison.
First Scene
- Difference between what the traditional Swiss style was and what Weingart did to transform it to become more experimental.
- Animations to show that although seemingly crazy, Weingart was very meticulous and precise—his work was very well thought out and ordered.
Second Scene
. Switch to a kinetic typography animation
. Considerations to animating how the process of typesetting under Weingart was very tiring and meticulous.
. Very fast faced zoom-on, zoom-out of typesetting.
Starting with the project, I thought a lot about the contrast I wanted to portray between Weingart’s vision and the traditional Swiss Style. With the illustration style above, I wanted to portray Weingart with a lot of textures and and colors, whereas the traditional Swiss styles would be portrayed with very flat, simple shapes.
Feedback
After the first round of feedback, I realized that my animation and storyboard was beginning to get very complicated. There was no clear vision, and a lot of the things I wanted to show (Weingart breaking the traditional Swiss style, meticulousness of Weingart’s craft) were not clear. There had to be more work done to simplify, and think a little bit more about how to make sure that the words being said are accurately represented with the video in a clear and concise way.
Thus, going back in to the video, I wanted to think more about some simple animations that could accommodate the things that Terry was saying:
. Rather than going with an illustration style, it could be interesting to represent Weingart and Hofmann (traditional Swiss) with different typefaces.
. When trying to represent how Weingart was this crazy, experimental force that the traditional Swiss style was not, I could try to show how Weingart’s style could not be constrained while the traditional Swiss style could.
The scene would start with Hofmann being constrained with grid lines and a black box around it, and when Weingart comes in, the grid lines and black box fail to constrain Weingart as it flashes between different typefaces that he experimented with.
With a clearer sense of the animation style, I began to animate the scenes in Ae.
A video that I found to be very inspiring was the Erik Spiekermann video that Brett had shown us at the beginning of the project. Although seemingly simple, I loved how chaotic and fast paced it was, and also the focus on just the typography.
Feedback
Critique today was pretty rough. My video still was not clear, and the artistic style was confusing.
. Although the idea with the box enclosing on the type was interesting, it was not clear what the intention was.
. The typesetting scene was awkward. The illustration style was not very pleasing, and there is a lot more to typesetting than just kerning.
. There was a lack of Weingart’s work throughout the video.
Some of the scenes just did not feel right—whether that be the idea or the animation. The art style still felt all over the place and I was getting too caught up in trying to create very elaborate, animated scenes.
After sitting down and talking to Brett, I realized that there was another avenue that I could explore—film. By physically filming myself typesetting and showing Weingart’s work, the issues with confusion of the metaphors and artistic style would be resolved.
The poster scene could be messy—as if someone was presenting to you work and placing it onto a table. I would bring the photos into the frame one-by-one, stacking all of his work together.
The typesetting scene could just be me typesetting the word “Kunstgewerbeschule” using a serif and a sans serif. I would try to capture a variety of different angles to make it seem more “cinematic.”
Thus, after a trip to the library to play around with the Swiss poster archive, and going down to the letterpress studio, I was able to come up with this:
Although not perfect, it felt closer to what I was trying to portray with my video.
Final Sprint
After another meeting with Brett, it finally felt as my video was getting somewhere. The typesetting scene was good—the messiness and texture of the video worked well with the point I was getting across. However, the poster scene was lacking. It felt forced, and the action of placing down the poster did not seem casual—I could probably achieve the same effect better through digital animation.
. The lines that appear on the video are very harsh—they could be thinner and flash in the video rather than sliding in.
. Instead of just Hofmann in the beginning, it could be each of the words that Terry is saying coming into the frame. “Hofmann” and the other words would come in in the same style, and “Weingart” would be in a serif font, italicized, and underlined—a style that he often used.
. The timing of the ending feels rushed—instead of ending on the name card, I should move the thank you to Terry to the end, and then make the name card shorter.
. Re-shoot the typesetting scene so that the typesetting happens on the center of the page—also, there is no need to animate over the metal blocks, it is enough to just cut to a scene with the word since it is so long.
Project Reflection
Animating is hard. Animating without a clear vision is even harder.
The video project ended up being a lot more challenging than I expected. Making an animation has a lot of considerations, and rather than being able to slap everything down on illustrator, there has to be meticulous planning and vision to make a good animation—otherwise, it becomes messy and confusing. I started off the project pretty lost, without a clear direction of where to go. However, doing simple things well always seems to work out the best for me at the end. Although the transitions and animations were simple, it was effective in communicating the story that Terry was trying to tell about Weingart.
Thank you Brett for an amazing semester—I learned a whole lot.
