Information Design: Project 2

-

2.2.2026 - 8.3.2026 / Week 1 -Week 5

Dave Christian Moniaga / 0385630

Interactive Design / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

Information Design: Project 2

Lectures
Instructions
Project 2

Feedback
Reflection

Instructions

Kinetic Typoraphy

This exercise involves us working in a 7 person team to create a lyric animation video with the song of our choice. As each person would need to do 4 lines per song, we selected a few songs that would able to fit the criteria.

The song that was chosen by our group was Bones by Imagine Dragons.

With my role as the group leader, I then separated the song lyrics into 7 parts all of which has 4 unique lines. The delegation of the workload are as listed:

Khalif Mikail Bin Mohd Ihwan
Yang Yang
Maira Aqilah Binti Mohd Hisham
Tan Khai Jiat
Yong Wenyi
Dave Christian Moniaga
Li Muzhen

The list of numbers corresponds to the color coded lyric delegation guide.

Fig 1.1 Bones by Imagine Dragons lyrics delegation for Green Team

From there we started by creating thumbnail sketches of our parts. This step should help us to visualize whether the lyrics would match with our ideas and other groupmates as well.

Fig 1.2 Early thumbnail sketches of Part 6

As part of my contribution, I also did several testing of font choices to check which ones would fit our song the most. Based on the group's decision, we ended up choosing Poster Cut Neue as our main font.

Fig 1.3 Font choices taken from Adobe Fonts

For the main colors of the design, we decided to take inspiration from the song's album cover and from the feedback of our lecturer who advised us to create a sketch like feeling into our lyric video. The main background color will be #fbefe2 and our accent color is #d5405d.

Fig 1.4 "Bones" album cover and our project's reference color

First, I downloaded the full song from Youtube into MP3 using YTMP3. Then, the song is imported into After Effects, I cut the bridge part of the song to do my part.

Fig 1.5 Cutting the bridge part of the song

To make my process much easier, I made a composition for each line. For the first lyric line; "Look in the mirror of my mind", I made each letter separately and paired them to a null for each part in their movement.

Fig 1.6 The separation of words and parenting to null objects

Other than moving the position of the null objects, some letters are also animated to scale up as they appear. I moved the anchor points first to the desired location using "Y" or Pan Behind (Anchor Point) Tool.

Fig 1.7 Animation using position and scale and adjusting anchor points

A small addition was made in the "Look" text, as seen in my thumbnail sketches, I wanted to place eyes as the text moves around. This was done easily enough by creating a shape layer with a 8px stroke circles that is paired to the "Look" layer.

Fig 1.8 Shape layer parented to "Look" text as eyes

For the mirror text, I wanted to have a reflecting effect of the text as it appears. With the help of this Youtube guide, I used an adjustment layer that uses the "Mirror" effect and soft masking of the mirrored text.

Fig 1.9 Mirror effect to text and soft masking to adjustment layer

Moving on, the next lyric line is "Turnin' the pages of my life". As shown in my thumbnail reference, I wanted to have a page turning effect as the words appear. From this Youtube video, I started by separated words that I wanted to turn into pages into a composition, then enable their 3D Layer to animate their Y rotation & curvature.

Fig 1.10 Using Cinema 4D renderer before applying 3D layer to turn the composition pages

To remove the flat feeling for each page turn, a point light is placed above and an ambient light at 40% is also set up in the scene. Cast shadows are also turned on in the material options for each composition text page.

Fig 1.11 Adding ambient light and point light (left) and casts shadows for each composition page (right)

"Walking the path so many paced a million times" is the next lyric line I need to work on. Although I tried my hardest to find a way that matched my thumbnail reference, the singer spoke the lines too fast and I could not find a method to have the footsteps cover the screen.

Instead I created a footstep effect that moves from the bottom of the screen up. In order to do this, I create a set of footprints in Illustrator that will be exported to After Effects.

Fig 1.12 Footprints vector created in Illustrator

After importing it, I turned the vector layer into shapes and duplicate a bunch of it while adjusting the position and opacity to mimic the animation of footsteps that fades in and out.

Fig 1.13 Imported footprints to create footsteps effect using opacity and layering

Another important edition for the animation in this line is the morphing text from "million" to "1000000". This video showed me that by overlaying two text together and applying a Gaussian Blur and Levels effect, we can achieve a smooth transition between two texts.

Fig 1.14 Morphing text "million" to "1000000" using Gaussian Blur and Levels effect (left) with the addition of Turbulent Displacement (right)

That with a turbulent displacement on top of it that helps to make the warping feel more natural.

Finally, the last lyric line is "Drown out the voices in your head". In this set up, I made each letter of "Drown out" separately so I can tweak the rotation of each one as it falls. Each word is also parented with a null object so moving each one will be easier as a group. I animated the position movement to mimic water movement as the text sinks and floats up.

Fig 1.15 "Drown Out" text is separated per letter and parented to null objects

To further emphasize that water effect, I also created a shape layer that flows and changes shape to mimic the movements created by the text falling. Other than its position, I manually adjusted the path shape as well.

Fig 1.16 Shape layer addition to match movement of text using position and path adjustment keyframes

As the shape layer comes up, the first words of the enxt lines are already placed behind it and the rest appears gradually using range selector based on characters & words. A simple edit that helps conclude the final lyrics.

Fig 1.17 Lyrics appear behind shape layer using range selector

The final outcome of my part of the song's bridge can be viewed below:

Fig 1.18 My final outcome video of Part 6

With my final outcome finished, I then collected all of my other member's contribution for their kinetic typography and compiled them all to match the full song in Premiere Pro. This way, I am able to add transitions between clips to make sure everything matches.

Fig 1.19 All audio and video placed in Premiere Pro

On top of that, I also placed a few texture layers on top of all the video to further enhance the sketch-like aesthetic that our lecturer suggested during our last feedback. The final look also made the overall video more polished and cohesive.

Fig 1.20 Textures layers added on top of all the video layers

Finalizing the editing in Premiere Pro, the final video was then uploaded to Youtube as shown below, concluding the group exercise of this project:

Fig 1.21 Exercise 1 - Final Kinetic Typography Group A Green Team

Animation Chart

The second exercise of Project 2 involves us to create a motion graphic chart based on a specific data that was given to each students. For mine, the task involves me to create a line graph from the data presented in this article about students under stress.

Fig 2.1 Data about students who presented with depression, anxiety or a relationship problem.

With the guidance from this youtube video, I started by placing all of the base value of the chart first. The grid lines were made by adding a Repeater into one stroke, creating 10 copies to match the amount of data value spread.

Fig 2.2 The grid lines & axis labels are created

From there I drew a straight line, stopping at each year's plot point. This is important as each points will be used to create nulls using a specific plugin.

Fig 2.3 Creating nulls from paths that was drawn

With nulls set in place, each point is now available to be moved up and down freely, I then set each point to match with the data provided in the article.

Trim Paths are also added into the stroke line, which will become the main animation spanning from the start to the end of the stroke. The keyframes for the paths are also applied with Easy Ease for smoother animation.

Fig 2.4 Trim Paths with keyframes from start to end with easy ease

For the bullet points itself, I made a short bounce animation that is placed specifically in accordance to the movement of the line's trim path as it reaches each point.

Fig 2.5 bullet point animation on each data year

With this process, I then repeated the same steps for the other two line data from the article. In addition of a title, labels for the x and y axis are also placed with a key/legend information at the bottom left.

Fig 2.6 All data, line, points, and information displayed

Inspired by another youtube guide, I added a few extra animation transition for the texts. I added a fading in animation using opacity and position. This animation paired with a stagger effect for each layer creates a gradual fade for each text.

Fig 2.7 Usage of position & opacity animation (left), with staggered layers (right)

Lastly, I added a glowing effect for each element & text using color control & drop shadow as shown in the picture. This creates a retro and digital look to the final design.

Fig 2.8 Glow effect using Color Control & Drop Shadow

The final animation chart is done and is available for viewing as shown below.

Fig 2.9 Exercise 2 - Final Animation Chart

Vector Animation

In this final exercise for this project, we are tasked to create an animation based from a vector / character illustration that was given to us. The vector illustration that I got was this character in a chair using his laptop.

Fig 3.1 Vector illustration version "D"

I opened the file in Illustrator to start separating each vector element. Making sure the element that I will be animating are separated properly. To make my process easier and faster, I used "release to layers (sequence)".

Fig 3.2 Using Release to Layers (Sequence) to separate individual layers

After importing the illustrator file as a sequence into After Effects, I started by parenting the necessary layers that will move together, such as the body layer and its connecting parts.

Fig 3.3 Parenting all of the connected layers into the body

From there I took a look at a few references on youtube for vector animation, alongside the guide that was given in our project briefing. I had an idea of having the character drop down from the sky and then proceeds to play in his laptop.

With a base idea, I started by animating the falling animation of the whole body and animated the leg and laptop movement to match the physics of the falling.

Fig 3.4 Animating the movement of the body, legs, and laptop separately

As I wanted to animate the character laughing, I also turned the smile vector layer into a shape and proceed to adjust the keyframes while moving the anchor points.

Fig 3.5 Creating shape from the "smile" vector to animate laughing

Since the character will be playing on his laptop, I used the puppet position tool in the body layer specifically to animate the hand moving up and down, mimicking the idea of him typing / playing in his laptop.

Fig 3.6 Using puppet position pin tool to animate typing motion

To add some flair, I also turned to create a shape from the visual sparkle layer and animated each element to have this bouncing pop up animation as he starts to type on his laptop. The text bubbles are also animated in an offset with the rest of the elements to make it look more dynamic.

Fig 3.7 Animating bounce & offset to each element

I also wanted to animate the time passing. I then created a shape from the clock vector layer and moved the clock's hand using rotation keyframes. Making sure to move the anchor point to the middle of the clock before I started animating it.

Fig 3.8 Moving the clock hand's anchor point to the middle to animate rotation

Lastly, I also added a wobble movement to give more impact when the character lands from falling into the chair. Using position and rotation to give this effect onto the books, soda, and plant.

Fig 3.9 Wobble movement caused by the character's landing

The final animation is then uploaded to youtube and available for viewing as shown below.

Fig 3.10 Exercise 3 - Final Vector Animation

Search This Blog

Dave Christian Moniaga (0385630)