The Moon Knows Solitude from Jennego on Vimeo.
Poem text: “The Moon Knows Solitude”
She hovers there in the dark sky
as I wander alone in the lonely night
wondering what I’m doing here
but the moon, she too knows solitude
Not just in one of her shy phases
hiding and peering in her celestial curtains
but she is too, all alone
Maybe Earth gives her company,
the flow of the tides
and as the awe of humanity
But she is lonely in her orbit
her dark side looking on to
the great planets with many moons,
and the cozy families too
But the moon – there’s no one like her around here
no other celestial orb to share her Earth
except for the odd asteroid (and space crap)
to keep her company every now and then
I stare into the night
sharing the moment with the moon
following her silver stare
and now here we are
less alone in our mutual friend,
solitude
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I wrote this over the weekend, thinking about solitude and then somehow thinking about the moon. In many ways it reflects us both I guess.
Surprisingly, I have little to say about this poem other than that I was too impatient to let it linger before revising it.
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Written, Designed & Animated by me.
Additional sound credits
Freesound credits (that got me flagged on Vimeo)
freesound.org/people/rhapsodize/sounds/171823/
freesound.org/people/Gorgoroth6669/sounds/76456/
freesound.org/people/Leandros.Ntounis/sounds/163607/
freesound.org/people/inchadney/sounds/25945/
Music
freemusicarchive.org/music/Chris_Zabriskie/
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Geek Stuff:
Render time: 1 hour (dud 3 renders due to unwanted ghosty motion blur)
Fonts: Sanchez, Corpse
Software: Illustrator (text layout), Photoshop (wave animation), After Effects (general composition, graphics and overall animation) & Premiere Pro CS3 (sound editing and rendering with Adobe Media Encoder).
I had no idea what I was doing. Well, I had many ideas of course …I just wasn’t sure how to execute them. Parts of them video are rather shaky and inconsistent since I don’t really have a good handle on controlling the animation .
Used this tutorial. (Old but it uses CS3 so that’s good for me)
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Ramble
I finally did it. This is my first real kinetic typography video. It’s not super fancy of course but I’m pretty happy with it. Motion is a bit jerky but it is improving. I haven’t figured out how to do smooth but very fast moves yet though.
I have it easier since I have no audio to sync. (Uh…I did have a typography to audio but…ehhh I think I may have to redo that one. Syncing audio in After Effects is a pain).
This is my second attempt at a kinetic type video – this one using the text in Illustrator first method (or you can type directly in After Effects). Ehh…there’s pros and cons to each method. As with anything with digital art there are like a zillion different ways to do something (and even more how NOT to do something!).
Used Premiere CS3 for sound mixing and rendering, After Effects CS3 for animation/images and Illustrator CS3…for the text. The images were actually made directly in After Effects (which is a bit odd…). I’ve never used Illustrator before so I was reliant on the tutorial I was using and googling….but it did made it easier to lay my text out. I didn’t use guides…I just eyballed it…I did’t need it to be precise anyway. The wave animation was made in Photoshop. I know I just used things in the way they aren’t normally used (except for the animation).
Having decided I suck at the 3D camera controls in After Effects CS3 (I’ve read they have improved since in later versions though…)…I’m not using camera controls this time and am sticking to 2D with scale (size) and position (where).
I wrote the poem over the weekend, revised it a bit and decided I didn’t want to wait until it gets better. And yeah…there’s no single moon planet in our solar system that we know of right now. Even the demoted former planet Pluto has 5 moons (Charon, Hydra, Nix + 2 to be named)
There were 3 things that I could just not figure out: 1) “Cut out”/mask out part of an image with another image and animating it, 2) Twinkling star field and 3) Get a circle shape to orbit in a circle. I know at least 2/3 of these are possible! It probably just bugs me though….I used workarounds instead (not quite what I wanted but something vaguely close…ish)….
I was going to make grass or something but I was just too lazy to and it didn’t really fit when I have some of the text so close to the bottom. The wave I already made about a month ago.
It was my first attempt at a soundscape with sound effects…bunch of crickets, owls and wolves mostly ha! Premiere kept crashing on me though (I find it easier to work with sound in Premiere…After Effects handles sound funny to me…)