Project Three: Narrative in Motion

Over the past few weeks in Type, the class has been creating narratives representing two ideas from a chosen letter and integrating them, with found imagery, into a Flash animation.First, we started by sketching out various compositions of the chosen letterforms. These sketches were then placed onto 3" x 3" cards to aid in the process of elimination. I chose to use Futura and Garamond due to their noticeable difference in stroke as well as being a san-serif compared with to a serif font.

After the initial compositions had been reviewed, I realized that many of my arrangements were entirely too cropped to be able to recognize the letterform. Because my chosen letter was a "b", I found it difficult to find appealing compositions while, at the same time, keeping legibility. In the second round, I worked on expanding upon the compositions I had already created and including more of the letterform. Within the next few rounds of iterations, I picked two of my best to start the sequences with.

After choosing the best compositions, our next assignment added imagery incorporating the words (shown in an earlier post; "b"rainstorm) starting with the letter "b". Creating four variations of different words and images, I chose bathroom--bacteria and bread--bacteria as my final two possibilities to create the narrative around.The class was then assigned to create a series of 9 sequences to document the transformation of our two typefaces (Futura and Garamond). I chose to base my narrative off the movement of the last sequence shown below not only due to the inclusion of my chosen compositions but also to because of the variety of motion of the letterform.

With the compositional work behind me, I began to explore Flash using techniques shown from the class demonstrations on masking, motion and shape tweens, as well scale, transparency, rotation and cropping. This was my first time even opening the program so it was definitely a challenge and I learned a lot. Specifically, save every few minutes! I had unexpected crashes more than a few times. Command > S will now be a regular habit.

Untitled from Bethany Ediger on Vimeo.