Candle in the Wind

Kinetic typography produced with scanned pages and replacement text via AE.

The piece combines disparate visual and aural stereotypes for humorous contrast.

Concept

I thought it would be a funny juxtaposition to superimpose a stereotypically “hick” voice onto some sort of high-minded “feel good” philosophical imagery, so the audio ended up being snuck onto pages of a book to make it feel old and wise. In an act of gross filial disrespect, I used one of my grandpa’s favorite books, The Day on Fire by James Ramsey Ullman (sorry Poppy) both because it had that older look and because they kindly included one of those “A Note on Type” pages at the end, making my hunt for the perfect typeface super straightforward.

Text Replacement

Again, thanks to the note at the end of the book, finding a typeface that was the same/as close to the original as possible was a cinch. I went with Adobe Jenson, a serif font similar to Caledonia.

After that, it was just a matter of finding, masking out, and replacing the text in the book with my own. I added some grunge via luma matte and a slight roughen edge+blur to give the replacement text a more printed and worn look, avoiding the clean vector lines. I think I also got some lint or hair on some of the scanned pages which adds to the physicality of the whole thing. Probably. There’s also a light animated paper texture running over the footage as well as a tiny wiggling parent null to give everything that slight shake.