Arielle Reed
Annette Vee
Kinetic Typography
5 December 2016
Hunger of the Pine Lyric Video
Although I did enjoy it some of the time, this was definitely the most frustrating project of the semester. Learning to familiarize myself with the program took ages, and there are so many intricacies I have yet to understand. I found tutorials confusing and the structure of the program itself to be difficult to navigate. I spent hours trying to accomplish a single task, only to have this task undone or changed in the program conversions between computers. Even my 2017 trial version of After Effects and the school’s 2017 After Effects on the lab computers (which should be the same) had misalignments, and my text would change every time on each new computer and I would have to go through it yet again to change the text. The song file I chose did not transfer from the lab computer to my own computer, and I had to re-download a new one. Then, I couldn’t find the identical song to the first version I had used online, and had to change at least half of my text timing and placement due to these differences. Lastly, I spent two days attempting to load the project into a .mov file for youtube, which refused to work on both my personal computer and the lab computers. There were constant error messages on both kinds of computers, saying there was no space on the computer or the After Effects program itself to render or save the video. Amid at least thirty rendering attempts and disjointed mov. files, I got the video to render completely only one time on a lab computer (sadly with text conversion errors.) Although I tried to re-render with the errors fixed, it again didn’t work, so unfortunately, the copy up on youtube isn’t the pretty one I’d like to show off. I’ve emailed you a copy of my original project in After Effects 2017 so that you can hopefully see the version I do like. With other finals and projects to work on, I confess that I gave up on this project toward the end. This project ate up way more than its fair share of my time, and at this point, I unfortunately have no more energy to give it and must move on to other work.
To explain some of my choices: everything in this video was planned. Firstly, I wanted to pick a song that I could listen to a million times—and I’m glad I picked the one I did because any other song might’ve driven me crazy. I chose the song “Hunger of the Pine” by ALT-J because I felt that the lyrics would be better represented in text than a lot of other songs. I mostly used font to do this. For instance, I made “butterflies” in a sort of floaty, script font, I made “needles” in a thin, sharp font, and I made “pine” in a font that was organic but tall and stretched out (among countless other examples). I wanted my background to feel organic too—the song is both very earthy and ethereal (something conveyed by the song’s real music video) so I chose a background that I felt conveyed both. Although the effect’s description says it’s stars (like the Star Wars intro) I think of it as a quieter effect, like someone looking up at the sky in the snow.
I tried really hard to keep this as simple as possible—not only for the sake of my own sanity, but to make sure that the video looked clean and crisp and wasn’t overwhelmed by colors or too many animations. I had colored text in initially, and had more words on each frame, but I felt that the video was starting to lack a theme. I returned the colors to white so it would contrast nicely with the background, and so that it wouldn’t look rainbow. I broke up my words so they had more impact on a page-to-page basis, so that the eye could follow better and so the song could be really felt more. I spent hours and hours timing the entrance and exit of every singe word to coincide with the beat of the song—which is so much harder to do than I ever thought.
Overall, I made a concerted effort to make the entire song quality and pleasant to watch. I wanted it to be streamlined and consistent and to be like something you would watch online. I worried a lot about ruining what I had already created, because the program seems so finicky. It took a long long time to put this together (at the lab and at home,) and I’m honestly pretty tired of looking at it, although I am proud of what I did accomplish—I hope my viewers like it too!
The video can be found here.
Check out the official music video here.
Works Cited
“Alt-J: Hunger of the Pine.” Youtube, uploaded by Proxima Centauri, 15 Nov. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk-GJDlAYVA. Accessed 4 Dec. 2016.
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