The two I decided to pick were the following:
The Dark Knight as my favorite, and
Kinetic type by Dani Alvarado as my least favorite.
Although, I admit, picking kinetic typography from that list was a little difficult as there were a few on there that I knew very well and loved dearly, but I chose anyway...
The reason I feel The Dark Knight did such a wonderful job was because of its pacing, its rhythm and the way in which the developer of the piece displayed certain aspects of the kinetic type. It was simple but commanded presence, much like the character of The Joker in the actual film.
The developer moves the type along with the stresses of the speech and makes sure to carefully, but importantly distinguish when The Joker is talking and his associate. They also do a great job of reinforcing what The Joker is saying throughout the speech by making the type follow the speech in its actions.
For example, when The Joker claims he's only going to burn his half of the money, half of the typography literally goes up in smoke. When The Joker is stressing the importance of gunpowder, dynamite and gasoline as simple tools to create the biggest sense of chaos, he makes sure to show the properties of each of those specific items by having them fizzle out like the actual material.
Other great examples were the stressing of the words as he spoke, just like The Joker was attempting to stress his meaning throughout.
However, in Dani Alvarado's kinetic type piece, you don't get that cohesiveness.
While I understand Alvarado is attempting to convey a message, the message they are trying to convey is instantly lost on the song. I found myself struggling to keep up with what they had going on in their piece as my attention was constantly being demanded by the song I was hearing and instead of focusing in on the words on the screen, I was too busy trying to understand the words of the song.
Additionally, I feel like things were rather disjointed in regards to the message they was trying to convey. They picked names based upon how they could utilize them to further move on the piece, but I was left there wondering what the point was supposed to be.
There was quotes from various presidents, from both party affiliations. There was an emphasis on the Iraq war and our debt and things of that matter, but some of the names given or quotes given had nothing to do with either. It felt jumbled.
If the point was that we're responsible for the fools we put in office, ok. I got that, but at the same time it makes me wonder why you would even bother putting the piece together in the first place? Most people who don't align with the current President's party think that everyone who voted for them is a fool. So in the end it's just fools voting for fools, and we think each other is wrong.
The message was confusing. I picked up very little in regards to that.
In regards to the actual type itself, some elements were just not timed well. They flowed too quickly, or didn't flow quickly enough. They were too sporadic without any real rhythm or feel to them and had fancy things done to them that degraded whatever the point was attempting to be.
It just... it really didn't line up very well with the music, and I think over all the music is what eventually throws everything off despite the above paragraphs of message gripe. If you're going to pick a song or a piece of audio to go with your kinetic typography, you need to make sure they flow. If one is moving faster than the other, or slower than the other, it just ends up feeling greatly disjointed.
Here's another piece I thought worked well. It was already up on the website we had to visit for this Journal Entry, but I love it to pieces:
No comments:
Post a Comment