Kinetic Typography - Happy Birthday Lisa!

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I’ve been meaning to have a bash at a technique called ‘kinetic typography’ for ages now, but only just got around to my first attempt.

The Brief
Basically, my boss asked me to create a quick birthday message for a colleague with the following brief “I want her to think that we’re going to tell everyone her age”. (Yes – HE is the little bird mentioned in the video.) So I suggested that we use this as an opportunity for me to try out kinetic typography to see whether it was suitable for some other projects we’ve got coming up. I wrote the script, recorded the VO and got cracking.
I didn’t finish until about 2am. Man this stuff is laborious. I thought rotoscoping was a pain in the royals, but this is something else! It’s entirely possible that there’s a simpler way to the one I’m using, but sadly, I have no idea what that might be. If you have any suggestions, I’d really love to hear them.

If I haven’t put you off the idea, I’ll be posting a tutorial on the techniques I used to create this video soon (probably starting with a quick tip on how to avoid using Lens Blur).
Stay tuned!
:l

So the carpet is pretty much down (due to the hard work put in by Steve the fitter – thanks mate!) and while I hate to admit it, my boss Richard was absolutely right about the amount of reverb that it would kill.
Even though the area covered by the carpet is probably less than a third of the total reflective surface in the room, I’d estimate a reduction of over 50 per cent in the amount of audio bouncing off the walls. In an interesting side note, apparently the carpet isn’t being glued to the underlay (which is the usual practice) as this will help to reduce to absorb more of the vibration. Guess it’s the same principle as de-coupled walls and ceilings.
Next stage will probably be the curtains, but I don’t have a date for that. Will post it when I get it.
Cheers!
Laurence



While freelancing has its advantages – not least of which is the freedom to work in your PJs without causing a stir (though this isn’t something I’d recommend for client meetings) – going back to full-time work is not without its benefits. The most obvious of these is the tangible relief of having a regular paycheck coming in each month without having to spend six months chasing a client to get it.

But more significant is finding a company that’s taking video content seriously enough to invest in it – and I’ve been lucky enough to find one that’s not only serious enough to employ a full-time producer like myself, but also willing to invest in the kind of equipment and installation that I simply couldn’t afford as a jobbing contractor.

One of the most exciting things for me right now is the creation of a dedicated studio space. What used to be a room where office furniture went to die is now becoming a custom-built recording studio that I’ll have pretty much to myself. (The fact that the boss also wants to use it as music studio for those moments when he wants to let rip with his guitar has played a fairly significant role in the fitout.)

As I write this, the paint is drying on the decoupled, double-insulated walls, and the underlay is about to be laid down by the carpet fitters. But the acoustics are absolutely terrible.

Which is to be expected from an open room filled with hard reflective surfaces. But we’re obviously not stopping there, so I thought I’d document some of the key stages so that you can see how it shapes up. Here’s the first part.

Cheers!
Laurence

 

(Disclaimer – I work for WiseTechGlobal/CargoWise. These observations are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.)

On the whole, I’ve been pretty lucky with the responses I get to my own work on YouTube. Of course, it helps that I’m giving people something that they find useful, but I’m always grateful when I get a positive comment. Even if it’s just ‘n1′.
But the Internet is – and always will be – the Internet, so there’s always going to be a degree of negativity seeping in through the walls. And I’ll freely admit that I still haven’t acquired the emotional neutrality required to let this kind of thing go without comment. On one occasion, I found myself doing two hours of deep research into one guy’s online profile so that I could word an appropriately withering smackdown. Definitely not worth it, and more than a little creepy on my part.
I try not to do that any more. But when I do get a negative commenter, I’ll usually have a quick neb at their profile (which is usually populated with other people’s content – insert the music, anime, CoD or Andrew Kramer rip-off video of your choice). Having established their lack of credentials, I can claim the moral high ground and move on.

Comments on the Xpress Lane Logistics video

Nice work guys - keep it up!

Yesterday, though, I noticed that a video I’d produced for CargoWise had received not one, but two comments and ratings – both of which were negative. This piqued my interest, particularly as it’s not the kind of video that typically gets comments at all.
A quick scan of the posters’ profiles revealed an incestuous relationship where four associated profiles were up-rating each others’ content, and downgrading anyone they saw as competition. In this instance, they had decided that CargoWise was a competitor to Xpress Lane Logistics. At time of writing, the XLL website was a long ways off being finished, but as far as I can tell, they’re a logistics company.

Hardly the most sophisticated competitive behaviour – it was way too obvious for starters, and the comments were all bunched together. If that didn’t give the game away, the absence of consistency certainly did – one of them claimed that they had worked with XLL on one occasion, but had discovered them via facebook in the other. What I liked the most, though, was the fact that they assumed CargoWise is a competitor to Xpress Lane Logistics. It’s not – at least I don’t think it is. CargoWise isn’t a logistics company – it’s actually a development company with a very successful logistics software platform.

So I felt that a response was required. Here it is:

Thanks for the feedback

I see that you’ve been busy voting down and putting negative comments on a number of logistics-related videos (including ours) and voting up XLL logistics with three friend/dummy accounts.

I’m sure Xpress Lane Logistics appreciates these embarrassingly sloppy efforts on their behalf, but you’ve overlooked one fairly important thing.
We’re not actually a logistics company – we’re a logistics software developer. (So a potential partner, not a competitor.)

If XLL would like to contact us to find out how our software can reduce their costs and streamline their processes, the contact details are on our website – cargowise.com. We’d be happy to hear from them.

Thanks for giving us all a good laugh on a Monday morning. You have a great day.

PS – Next time you’re in the office, you might want to let them know that there’s a typo in their ‘xpresslanelogistics.com’ video.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

There are several things that they should take away from this experience:

1: Don’t run a negative campaign until you’ve got something positive of your own to show.

2: Be consistent in your comments – pick a story and stick with it.

3: Don’t do it all at once. You’re more likely to get noticed if there’s a sudden flurry of negative activity on a post.

4: But most importantly - just don’t do it. A company that engages in negative campaigning is only building a poor reputation for itself.

Cheers!

Laurence

Some of you may remember that I posted something similar to this late last year (and then shortly deleted the post). Basically what happened was that I got myself a new theme for the website (a little bit prettier, and a little more powerful than the one I’m currently using). I installed it, hit preview, and immediately chickened out.
Nothing looked right, nothing worked right, and it was a long way from being the site I saw in my head when I started out.

But it’s a new year, and what better time can there be for overhauling things than now? So I’m going to give it another try. I’ve backed up my articles, backed up the site and backed up the database, so if it all goes to shit, I can roll it back to where it was when I wrote this.

In the meantime, expect things to break. I’m not a WebDev or code monkey, and I don’t know how to do all this locally, so it’s all going to happen on the live site. Which means stuff will look weird, things will be broken, and objects will move around like there’s a poltergeist doing my web design for me.

Hopefully, it’ll all end well. Otherwise, expect to see the site exactly as you left it last year.
Cheers!
Laurence

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