Statement of Intent

I have been given the brief to create an animation lasting between 30 – 90 seconds that is giving information about a statistic of our choice.

Instead of finding information about random facts and silly statistics, I have decided to literally create an animation giving statistics on statistics and tell people about how completely made up and unreliable statistics are. I had a look around the Internet and registered statistics websites but found it extremely difficult to find anything out about statistics at all. I ended up finding a website which had statistics given by mathematical professors and others. However, when thinking about it, I’ve realised that having unreliable statistics is a clever twist that matches my animation. I want people to watch my animation and decided for them whether or not even my animation is telling the truth.

I’ve decided to create my animation in Adobe After Effects instead of Flash because I want to give myself more of a challenge since I already know how to use Flash very well and I’d like to try and teach myself a new programme from scratch. I’ve decided to learn After Effect instead because it is supposed to be a very similar programme to Flash but can create even better animations and designs, especially kinetic typography.

I’ve decided to create a kinetic typography animation instead of a “cartoon”, hand drawn, character-based animation. I want it to look different to everyone else’s and I think that my subject would look really good. Statistics is a very plain, bland subject, so I want to use kinetic typography to visually make it more interesting.

I intend to use bright colours for the words, maybe a mixture of white, green and pink. I want to do this because I want a black and silver gradient background and I think that these three colours will stand out enough on the background that the reader will be able to read to words clearly. I think these colours will also make the animation brighter and more colourful and therefore more interesting more the person to watch.

I’m going to add a song to the background of the animation instead of a voice over, and I will try and find a fast pace bit of music, drum and base or something similar so go with the tempo of the words. I’ll need to go online and find some free music that suits what I need.

The words will be quite fast like normal kinetic typography, but slow enough for the reader to be able to read it. I will also take advantage of the cameras in after effects by placing the camera over each word as it moves along giving more time for the audience to read every word. The words will come on to the screen one at a time making it even easier to read, allowing me to speed up the tempo of the animation anyway.

I’m going to show people that statistics are bad and shouldn’t be listened to, and use a quite stern tone of voice, asking the audience personally and making it connect to the person watching so they question statistics and the use of them.