Kinetic Typography

Kinetic typography is a type of animation that involves moving text- it can shrink and grow, move around a screen and change into images, among other things. This is used most commonly with lyric videos, as the possibilities introduced by those lyrics are almost endless when it comes to ways of engaging a viewer.

While doing my own research, I couldn't help but notice some of the aspects that make it so effective. One of the most important things to get right in my opinion is colour balance. Some videos, like Phoenix (attached below) use black, white and one colour family. Since a theme within the lyrics is that of a phoenix, therefore fire, they used very warm colours- reds, oranges and yellows. None of these colours threw off the balance and stole the show, they all worked in harmony together.

When the colour balance isn't done as well as this, a video can leave you very underwhelmed or even disappointed. An example of this is a video for My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (attached below). I have watched this video on two different screens- the difference was astounding. These days most people will watch videos such as this on a phone rather than a desktop, so it would make sense to cater for the phone viewers. The video looks so much better on the desktop. The aspect that changes the experience is just one colour. The video only uses black, white and a muted red colour. Had this red been a little brighter, it still would have fit with the theme of the song and looked 10x better on the phone screen. It is certainly interesting how a video can be thrown to either end of the rating scale all because of one colour.

Another thing to watch out for with these videos is the balance between text and imagery. While I completely agree that imagery can help emphasise lyrics, I do not think that it should replace large sections. So the occasional word within a song, for example a word that is repeated a lot and easily recognised, I feel it is feasible to replace the word with imagery. If the word or words being replaced are not easily distinguishable or repeated often, it should not be replaced or it will put the viewer off. Two videos that show this balance or lack thereof are linked below this- Radioactive and On Top Of The World. Radioactive replaced far too much of the lyrics with imagery. If I had known the lyrics to this song already, I would have been incredibly confused. On Top Of The World is an example of, in my opinion, perfect balance. Simply adjusting the angles of some of the words created some of the imagery we want, which I find incredibly clever.