St.Chroma:
A Kinetic Text
St. Chroma is a song by Tyler, the Creator. I created a 20-second kinetic text that only uses After Effects. I wanted to challenge myself creatively to make something I wouldn’t normally make using only vector morphing and After Effects built-in effects. My goal was to get it done by October 28 2024 so that I could release it on the same day as Tyler, the Creator’s album “Chromakopia.”
Time Spent: 10 hours ~ Tools Used: After Effects ~ Duration: 20 seconds ~ Completed on October 28th 2024
Structure leads to flow
I start my projects with planning out as much as I can. From the processes to the looks, I consider how it should be done. After researching other kinetic texts, I was particularly inspired by the teasers that Tyler, the Creator released for his album, Chromakopia. I liked the St. Chroma teaser the most. I selected the last 20 seconds because the opportunity to play around with the transition in the song intrigued me.
I wanted to interpret the teaser into vector form by keeping similar color schemes and themes. I went through a couple of storyboards and pulled the parts I liked the most from each.
Creating the Building Blocks
To begin, I split the lyrics into scenes and chopped the song so I could work in separate compositions. I tackled the text scenes first. The more complicated scenes that involved morphing took a lot more time. At first, I create a 3D text animation within After Effects and I was very proud of it. I tried really hard to make the 3D animation work and fit into the overall animation, but it was too jarring and felt unrelated to the other scenes. I had to make the hard choice of cutting the scene to make the overall kinetic text better.
After I had finished the animations, I decided to experiment with stylizing it through effects in the adjustment layer. I added a time effect that advanced the animation every note of the song, a film grain effect, some color filters, and slight jitter. It made the animation feel a lot more cohesive and finished.
Refining the Process
As one of my first steps into kinetic texts, I felt happy with the end result. I thought the experiment went well. I used a lot of After Effects features I had not used before and I feel a lot more comfortable working in the program.
In reflection, I can see more things I can improve on. The final effects I added in the adjustment layers helped in some areas and didn’t help in others. The time effect made the animation look a lot more choppy than I had intended. Some individual animation need to be smoothened out more to make it look refined rather than stiff.
I still see how my lack of camera movement and depth in my compositions hurt my animations. I hope to improve this in my future work.