This short clip was a school project where we were tasked with creating a 30 second video that revolves around words. Naturally, most people myself included made them song lyrics. We created the videos in After Effects but I made most of the assets in Illustrator. A big part of this assignment was making the words flow in an interesting way that captivates the viewer’s eye, so adding imagery to support it and different motion techniques was very important.
We were just supposed to take a short segment of a song or speech and animate it’s lyrics in an interesting way. The song I chose for this project was “Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)” by The Clash. This song has a very distinctive sound through both the instruments and Joe Strummer’s voice. I knew at the beginning I wanted to do the first verse and part of the chorus because of it’s fun imagery such as the New York, Lightning and rain and snow parts.
I am very inspired by clean vectorized lines and tend to gravitate towards them, so that something I thought would work out well for this project. I created all of the assets, besides a few supporting boxes, in Illustrator as vectorized layers of a .ai file and exported them to After Effects. The colours I chose were very muted and dull because I didn’t want bold, exciting colours to overwhelm the viewer and I though the simpler colours were enough to portray the video in an interesting way without hurting the eyes.
I think overall, I am happy with the final product, but there are some changes I would make before I turned it into a full length music video. Some of the transitions are not as smooth as I would have liked and some of the timing when it comes to the easing controls are not quite tuned perfectly. I do like all of the sliding elements such as the Statue of Liberty and the rain-snow transition.
I feel like this project showed me the importance of taking your time and trying out different timing combinations when making motion graphics videos. In the future, I will try to be more gentle and smooth with the transitions and movement keyframes. The overall feedback was usually positive, but I did get some criticism about the repetition when it comes to backgrounds and text colours. In future projects similar to this, I may look at switching up the text and background colour when it makes sense in the context of the video I am making.
