INTERPRETING VOICE:A three part project for Graduate Studio I

Jessica SchaferFall 2010School of DesignCarnegie Mellon

PART ONE

problem:

constraints:

process:

Enhance the meaning of the words in a quote through the use of hierarchy, position, chunking, letterspacing, wordspacing and contrast.

The quote must appear within a 7” square using a 10 pt Frutiger typeface in one weight of our choosing. Text must be horizontal and printed in black ink.

First things first: I had difficulty settling on a quote for to use for the project, but when I came across a short poem attributed to the French poet, playwright and art critic, Guillaume Apollinaire, I was immediately drawn to it. Now I was ready to get started.

Raw material!

Next, I played with the words, both on the page and orally, repeating the poem aloud several times to get a feel for it’s rhythm and flow.

While the poem is fairly short and simple, it contains a strong narrative: in the first lines tension builds between two voices and then is released in the final line. In my drafts I explored depicting the strong internal structure of the text and actions of calling, pushing and flying.

Several drafts exploring word spacing and placement around the square.

PART ONEFinal

In my final composition, I focused on the final imagery of flight by creating a solid grouping and releasing the final words across the page. I used the roman 55 weight of Frutiger, because the poem feels like neither a shout nor a whisper, but a straightforward declaration.

PART TWO

problem:

constraints:

process:

Add the element of time. Create a computer animated sequence that communicates the meaning of your quote, considering motion and sound as an integral part of the piece.

Digital format, no larger than 600 x 800 pixels. Text can be set in any typeface, carefully consider any usage of color or images.

Entering this second part of this project, I was very wary about adding too many elements that would distract from the clarity of the poem. Feeling overwhelmed by options, I decided to take inspiration from Apollinaire’s own style of shaping his poems into literal pictures of their subjects. My storyboard sketches focused on using the movement of the Initial storyboard ideas.

text on the screen to mirror the imagery in the poem—forming an edge and flying away. When I first started translating my ideas onto the screen in Adobe After Effects, I struggled with getting the motion and timing right. Everything with either too fast or too slow! Here again, speaking the poem aloud repeatedly helped me find the right rhythm. I also worked on sketching the motions of the transitions between lines in order to understand how they should look on the screen.

I experimented with using colored text in the final line of the poem, perhaps to highlight the final release, but it felt forced. Instead I stuck with black and white and set the text in ITC New Baskerville, as a nod to the traditional serif typeface seen in Apollinaire’s work.

After going back and forth between using the sound of a breeze blowing the final line away or wings flapping, I settled on wings flapping and worked to match the movement of the final letters with the sound of the wings flying away.

Sketches of key transition points in my animation: the pushing motion and the final flight pattern.

PART TWOFinal

01; 09 03; 11

05; 21 06; 20 09; 09

13; 05 14; 20 15; 10

The final animation is just over 30 seconds long, 720 px by 480 px, 30 fps. See included disc for full viewing!

17; 10 19; 14 20; 00

20; 20 21; 16 23; 05

24; 05 26; 18 29; 08

Return to your composition from Part One and add a second 7” square next to the original square that contains an image. The image should enhance or challenge the reading of the quote and may go to the left or right of the type.

Two 7” squares next to one another with no margin between the two, printed with a 4” margin around both squares.

My main hurdle was whether the image should be a literal translation of some aspect of the poem or not? I considered people jumping or flying, looking over edges, or even just a picture of the sky or an edge in the form of a cliff or wall. I looked through hundreds of images, pairing each one with my composition from Part One.

PART THREE

problem:

constraints:

process:

One possibility—but one that felt too expected.

Most of the literal photos just felt boring. I moved on to more inventive ‘flying’ images, focusing on people practicing parkour, a street sport that involves leaping over and scrambling around buildings and street furniture. But it still wasn’t working.

Looking for fresh ideas, I started to think about the poem as a broader call to action. Having a strong interest in politics, a call to action quickly led me to think about great political orators whose image would be immediately recognizable. I considered a couple possibilities but settled on Martin Luther King Jr. I still remember the first time I heard his “I Have a Dream” speech and I can only imagine the mixture of hope, excitement and fear that must have run through the people who first heard him deliver it in 1963. This mixture of emotions struck me as similar to those evoked by the poem—the idea clicked!

Good poem pairings? (Above: Parkour stunts. Below: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.)

In my final composition, I used an image of King facing the crowd during the March on Washington, in the moment

PART THREEFinal

of calling on the American people. The line of his arms spread wide echoes the sweeping motion of the final line of text

on the right. Also, the black and white image maintains the color theme from the previous two parts of the project.

Allow an idea to mature over several iterations—don’t force it.

Pinning your work on a wall and walking away can provide invaluable perspective. (Everyone says it, but it really works!

After Effects is impressively versatile.

Finding high-resolution images suitable for printing is incredibly difficult.

Print several times: your work will turn out different each time.

Apollinaire never wrote the words I used! A British poet wrote a similar poem about Apollinaire in the 1960s, but the ultimate source of the text I used is unknown. No matter, it’s still a great poem.

LESSONS LEARNED

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