Rationale
Following the Week 8 class exercise, it became clear that what my issue was going to be was how the text was going to flow and move and how it was going to be laid out. The way my work came out was extremely jumpy and way too fast. This is what lead me to do a lot of test animations in Adobe Animate so I could feel out different typefaces, layouts and timings (i.e. how far things were spaced apart, how far I could experiment with animation principles such as squash and stretch and anticipation (see “what” and “stand” for this exercise)
I put together a mood board. Whereas I was looking at the actual stage show, I now turned to the brand. I played with the idea of making it look like a stage show but ultimately decided against it – it would be too busy. I did experiment with red in my animation tests – to me, it just clashed and looked out of place. The branding is clear and recognisable – a golden background with black and white text. Ultimately what I decided to go for was this, as it would be more recognisable to the people who would be interested in seeing the show. I went out and bought black paper and a glitter gold card stock. I saw it and knew that the way it would interact with my lighting would be interesting in the way it could the refract light. I had already done some experiments with golden/background stock photos with my test animations playing on top.
This rationale goes hand in hand with choosing the “Outgunned, Outmanned…” lyrics. It’s recognisability. I’ve seen people start reciting these lyrics upon hearing, “Outgunned”. I’ve included a few images of products and designs from around the web out people referencing this lyric. I looked at other lyrics, however, although they were powerful moments musically, as lyrics they didn’t hold the same weight as the “Outgunned” Lyric.
Where I took liberties with the branding was with my font choices. I knew I wanted to include Trajan (the typeface the play uses), I did play with other Serif Fonts similar to Trajan (as I feel Trajan is overused) however, I did settle on Trajan as the correct choice for the project in this case as it is part of their brand. However, I took liberties because I wanted to encapsulate the period (the Late 1700s, Early 1800s) and also the tone of the play (the music genre being rap). For the period I settled on the typeface Broadsheet, I explored similar typefaces, but none captured the period in the same way this one did. For the more modern feel I animated my hand-drawn text mostly for the secondary lyrics, i.e. (what?), (buck, buck…).
