All entries from April 2009

I just put the finishing touches on a new Volumeone Season called
The Road Less Traveled. It was the first time that I had a song written especially for the project before any design was started. The process was a very unique one for me and I wanted to share it.

Making the Song

The Road Less Traveled takes its inspiration from American folks tune from the likes of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. I worked with Fletcher C. Johnson to write the song. Fletcher and I sat down and I gave him some general direction. I knew I wanted the song to be about an ophan/misfit kid from Appalachia that travels around playing songs and leaves his hometown to explore the world. I also liked the Seeger/Guthrie idea of the banjo/guitar as a weapon for social change to bring about a new way of thinking. I gave Fletcher a list of terms and ideas and sketched out a few ideas.

A few weeks later Fletcher played me a cassette tape of a rough of the song in his apartment and we agreed on a sparse arrangement that was upbeat but not too silly. I really like the tune and think Fletcher expanded on some of our original ideas to create a great song. With a little spit and polish The Road Less Traveled was done. Now it was up to me to make it into something.

Generating the type

I sat down with the finished song and wrote out all of the key words and phases. I did not want to simply illustrate the song visually because I felt that it could become too cartoony. I drew a bunch of radios and clocks and things until I realized the illustrated approach was the wrong direction.

I have been really into the typographic work of Ed Ruscha and inspired by the typography that appears on old fruit crate labels. Both have a very “American” feel to me just like the song. I decided that I wanted the actual words of the song to be the hero of the piece and set about sketching out different words.

I decided to draw all of the type in Illustrator so that I could more easily it break the type apart and animate it later. Needless to say it’s not easy to make dimensional type in Illustrator and even harder to make all of them look good. After a few months of work I had drawn about half of the words and started to design the overall look of the piece.

Designing the idea

The key to making all the type cohesive was to define a more limited color palette. The palette allowed me to develop a set visual vocabulary so that when I had to create other words or visual elements I had a well-defined approach to start from. In addition, the use of the cork pin board helps ground the visuals in an overall idea. Basically the cork pin board is the final resting place for the memories from the Road Less Traveled story. Like a postcard on your refrigerator, the cork pin board holds postcards containing the words from the song as well as other mementos from the misfits’ travels.

I created two static pin board walls to get a general layout and also created 9 postcards of the most interesting words from the song. With the pin boards and postcards complete it was time to start animating.

Creating the motion piece

I used the static pin boards to create a general flow for the animation and also added in two new landscapes for the chorus of the song to break up the action. All of the scenes for the animation were blocked out using static images of the type and other elements to speed up the process. There was no sense in animating any type until I knew how long the type needed to animate for.

After the animation was blocked in, I set about animating all of the type. To animate each piece of type, every stroke of each letter had to be separated out in Illustrator so that each part could be masked one at a time. Once separated, the letters’ parts were brought into After Effects and masked on one-by-one. This process took several weeks.

After the type was animated, I set about building all of the postcards and other scene components. During this time I basically “filled in” the static rough cut one scene at a time. To save rendering time, I left out all moving footage. After all of the major elements were animated I made adjustments to timing and pacing to lock down a final edit.

After the bulk of the animation was completed, I called up Fletcher and had him come by the studio so we could shoot him on green screen. Up until this point all of the images of Fletcher in the animation were static images of Jason in our studio used for placement only. Now that I had a fairly finished edit I could shoot Fletcher playing and slot him in.

Putting it all together

The final piece took a long time to render because it was built at HD resolution. Before the animation was complete I picked up the postcards from the printer. To give folks online a closer look at the type, I created a scrollable corkboard wall in Flash using the vector files my original static designs.

For me, creating the typography and working to translate it into print, motion and an effective online presentation allowed me to show the piece in different ways and hopefully show others how a design idea can be translated into different mediums. I also feel the postcards reinforce the idea of the motion piece while reminding people of the physical world and the need to go out there and explore.

Overall I am happy with the end product. I wish it had not taken me so long but I hope the time and effort I put into The Road Less Traveled shows and I hope that people enjoy it.