Kinetic Typographical Life

Wasn't that the name of your band at college?

I am enjoying your recent reviews very much, by the way.

No, if I'd had a band in college it probably would have been called Bookman Bold Italic. It was the '70s...

They misspelled "mattress."

Obviously, they didn't have the goddamn common courtesy to run a spellcheck. :)

unfortunately not even a single video seems to be up... im sorry for that Jim

JE: Maybe it was YouTube maintenance or something. They're all working for me.

Man those are all classics, and the animation is great.

"Eight year olds dude."

LMAO

yeah u r right Jim they are up now!

Mr. Ermey's first initial is R, not F.

It's like attributing something to 'R. Murray Abraham'.

JE: Whoops. More like R. Lee Bailey. Sorry. The F is just below the R on the keyboard. Fixed it.

Does the Big Lebowski clip sound a bit speeded up? Have I really seen it that many times?

H

Those are all great.I'd suggest the Pulp Fiction and Tenacious D ones aswell.

Wouldn't this be a great thing for the screen-writing awards at the Oscars? I could tolerate hearing "I drink your milkshake" out of context for the hundreth time if it was accomponied by one of these.

Is this one idizzle that can't be unidizzed, home-skillet?

I love this stuff! The Matrix clip was a little disappointing... I think the "Mr. Anderson, it seems you have been living two lives" scene would have worked really well.

This is truly great entertainment.

That is all I have to say, as that is all there is to be said.

Grrr, they've all been taken down again. I gotta start being quicker about watching YouTube videos...

Whoops, sorry. Ignore my last post. The clips worked fine after I refreshed the page. Great stuff, by the way.

I'm sorry, but allow me to be on the opposition here. In my opinion these are all fairly poor imitations of this video (or others by it's makers):

http://www.mk12.com/video-popup.html?video=/v5_quicktime/2003/brazil.mov&title=BRAZIL%20INSPIRED%3A%20MACHO%20BOX&date=&info=2003&type=inhouse

The linked video is done by MK12 - the guys who did the graphics in Stranger Than Fiction - and they're (also in my opinion) the best in the motion graphics game. Now, I don't ask that everyone be on the level of MK12 (that's probably impossible), but these other ones look like student work by kids who are a little too in love with somebody else's style.

Not to mention there is little to no conceptual thinking involved in the ones above. "Imaginative"? are you serious?

They just present the words from the movie, a feat not that difficult if you know a few After Effects tricks.

Watch that MK12 video and see the way they not only take the words, but then bring creativity and life out of them.

Most of the ones above ("Lebowski" excluded, though helvetica is kind of a lazy choice) don't even have great use of type. the novelty font Steak? Really? The military stencil font for a movie about the military? That's wildly imaginative.
The ocean's eleven one (also Helvetica *yawn*) doesn't even bother to mask the words out before zooming in on them.

You guys all need higher standards in your motion graphics. It's as important an art for as any other (even film), and this is like if you would regularly cover 27 dresses instead of No Country for Old Men here on Scanners.

JE: Thanks for the link, Jordan. I wish they'd pulled back at the end to show us a "map" of the whole thing! That's one of the things I like so much about the "Ocean's 11" one -- the type is laid out in a geographical way, and the visual punctuation is mostly a matter of how and when the "camera" moves over the topography. MK12 did several of the AMC bumpers, but I don't know if they did the "Full Metal Jacket" one above. You're right about some of these clips being student work, though: Some are posted with notes saying they were composed for college design projects. (P.S. Don't get me started on Helvetica. To me, avoiding Helvetica is like avoiding black or white. It's neutral, and that's what I like about it. You can do almost anything with it. Too many other fonts try to hard to call attention to themselves. In fact, the only thing I don't like about the "Ocean's 11" animation is that the two interjections by Brad Pitt are in a different (uglier) font.