What’s Behind Door Number 10101?
For the assignment “What’s Behind Door Number 10101?”, I began by taking a look at my project options. None of the three suggestions particularly appealed to me, but one of the recommendations under the section “Something Else, Almost Anything Else,” stood out: kinetic typography. I’d never tried it before, but I’d always wondered how people had done it in the lyric videos I’d seen employ it. I decided to give it a shot.
I began by googling, “How to do kinetic typography,” but most of the tutorials I found were made for Adobe AfterEffects, which I did not own. I did, however, find a pretty helpful article on EnvatoTutsPlus about how to do kinetic typography on PowerPoint, though this led me to think about my project a bit further. I figured that if a person can animate words on something like PowerPoint, they could probably animate anything to an extent, since tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides are essentially virtual flip books. I did a bit more research into this idea and found a Google Slides animation tutorial on Ditch That Textbook. Since I knew it was possible, I decided to try something new and create a basic animation using clipart on Google Slides.
I began by creating a basic scene: the sky, some hills, and the sun. I started by putting in my key frames, including the sun’s rise, its peak, and its set, then I went in and filled the frames between the keys. I decided I wanted 24 frames, but I duplicated my animation so it could loop once. I then added in clouds, turned down their opacity, and moved them frame by frame so that it looked like they were floating across the sky. The most time-consuming and difficult piece of this process, however, was the coloring of the grass and sky. I changed each of the color gradients along with the time of day and the sun’s position, though this changed in every frame. It took about two hours for me to finish this part of the project, and overall I am pretty happy with both how it turned out and what it taught me I could do with virtual slideshows in the future.
