Tolkien and Typography
On March 24th, 2019, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an article that revolved around Bill Fliss and his new project — to get six thousand oral stories about Tolkien for his oral story project. The beauty of being a part of this collection is that you are becoming a part of history. Your story becomes a part of the university’s Special Collections, and included within an archive that is already is rich with info about Tolkien.
I, too, have contributed into this collection, but not with a contribution of a oral story; I instead used typography to assist in the process.
In the article written by the Journal Sentinel, it explains more in detail what Bill plans to do with the collection. If you look a bit further down, there is a link to a YouTube video, this YouTube video! That video was made by the hardworking tutors here at the Digital Scholarship Lab! This video is surfacing not only in the Journal Sentinel, but also linked in USA Today! Bill came to us asking to create a video that would be visual appealing and could strike an audience, so the tutors and I began to process.
The hardest part about the project was creating something that was visually engaging despite the fact that all we had were audio clips of these people’s answers. Right away, we all came to the idea that we should create key words and phrases that pop. These words were to encapsulate what it meant to be apart of the oral history. This was the starting ground for the video! At first, I thought that Premiere Pro would be able to handle the job, however three hours into the project I realized I needed something different. This is where After Effects came in.
Originally, I was fearful of completing the task and making it appealing. I knew that I wanted the words to appear as the speaker said them, but ultimately Premiere couldn’t do that. This was not the end of Premiere for this project though. After some digging I found out that I can add words to After Effects and layer them on top of a blank canvas. Once I do that, I could combine all the files to create a montage of people’s answers. This was the revelation that I needed. It was going to be visually interesting whilst getting the main points across to the viewer.
The next step was to create each slide as seen in 1.1, and to time the words to the speaker. To maintain visual interest I kept the words within a boundary, changing the size of words and the fonts. The video was done in tekton 100pt font, and the important words were done in either stencil bold or impact, also 100pt font.
To do the timing effect, After Effects has an audio wave tracker for audio files that you can line up with the words when they appear as seen in 1.2. This is what a finished sample would look like. Though a little confusing, the red bars represent when the word appears in the audio clip. Each word in this instance gets it’s own layer, and to make things clear I would put the bold words on the bottom. Organization was important as some responses had up to sixty words.
Once I got all the responses typed out, Premiere allowed me to add some slides, quick transitions, and royalty free audio files to coincide with the speakers answer. Premiere was beneficial as it allowed me to change the timing in my dissolves between slides, audio transitions, lower the audio of certain speakers, increase the audio of other speakers, and manage the audio of the song playing in the background.
All in all I’m very proud of what was accomplished. Tolkien has changed my life for the better. The Hobbit is the story that encouraged me to read as a kid, and opened my mind to the world of wonder that is the fantasy genre. I hope that you decide to join the Muster and be apart of Tolkien history!
