mariel olivo

Okay, so I found something WAY cooler than the Ne-Yo video. In my Flash animation class, we’ve started a new project on motion typography, and a fellow graphics major introduced me to this video. It’s Jay-Z featuring Santogold (I LOVE her) and the song is called “Brooklyn (Go Hard).” The song, off the Notorious soundtrack, is ooookay…but the video is AWESOME!! The word ‘Brooklyn’ gets spelled out over and over again, each individual letter stacking itself on top of the last. The great part? It eventually starts to draw out Jay-Z’s face in type. I’m talking about reeeeally detailed stuff here. Halfway through the video, it gets erased and Biggie’s face gets its own illustration (complete with the crown, of course). You’ll get it when you see it:

Apparently, director Evan Roth has been turning down requests for Typographic Illustration for five years in hopes that Jay-Z would one day call–and he did! If you want the source code, you can find it here.

Remember that time when I said I was going to be posting more regularly…and then I didn’t? Yeah, my bad. In my defense, it’s been a pretty exciting time in my life. My new nephew/godson was born last Monday, so I took an impromptu trip down to Brooklyn to meet him!! Unfortunately, that left me playing catch-up with schoolwork and so I didn’t really have to time blog. But we’ll try this again…

The other day I was watching a commercial for a Grammy nominees album, and they showed a few seconds of R&B artist Ne-Yo’s video for “Closer.” Now, I used to LOVE this song (still do, I guess)…but one of my favorite parts has always been the music video. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video doing such exciting things with typography. Watch it! Watch it!!

I love everything about this video. It’s so simple, yet so slick and effective. They took the concept of subtitles/a singalong video and made it modern and fun. My favorite part happens around 1:37, when they mix together words and visuals (also check out :53, 1:19, and 3:12 for more of the same). I just don’t think there’s any way they could’ve possibly captured this song any better in a visual format.

I just can’t stop watching it. Okay, I tried not to make that bad joke (refer to song lyrics)…but I couldn’t help myself.