Font Poem Animation Design Rationale

**Sorry that I do not have the actual animation up yet. The movie takes long to upload.**

In this project, I hoped to make a collage that had some relations to what the font poem said and meant. In my opinion, it was hard for me to find decent pictures to use for the font poem because some of the words did not have a visionary picture, and I had to go what I felt was right.

I have decided to do the collage with various landscapes. What I did was placed them first where I wanted them, and then I used the blur tool on the left side to get rid of the straight lines. I wanted the pictures to somewhat come together. Out of all of the pictures, there were three that involved water and the ocean.

• One picture was of the tides, and that picture actually went with the word "tides" in the font poem. I placed this picture near the area where the word "tides" is said to give it a natural feeling.
• Another picture was the entire background of the collage: a sunset purple color of the ocean at the foot of a valley of mountains. I chose this picture because I liked the color of the sky and how it reflected on the ocean. I thought this picture also gave some sort of a message which said that there is always some light in darkness. In my mind, light can parrallel happiness and darkness can parrallel sadness, and the topic of the font poem was about happiness, so I put it in.
• The final ocean picture was the opposite: a scene of the ocean at sunrise. It was a beautiful color of blue, that showed light breaking through the darkness in the distance, which gave the same meaning with the picture above. I placed this picture in the upper right corner near the word "Happiness" to show that happiness can break through sadness.

There were three other pictures that I felt contributed to the font poem with a similar meaning to the landscape ocean pictures I talked about before.

• The first picture was of a white star in a red background. This was similar to the light = happiness thought that I used the ocean pictures. I placed the picture in the upper left corner near the word "Happiness" which is similar to what I did for the sunrise ocean picture.
• The second was of light breaking through the clouds. Again, I believed that the light resembled happiness. Because the word "IT" refered to the word "Happiness" in the font poem, I placed the the picture near the word "IT" above the picture of the tides.
• The third picture was of a brain. This is the only picture that is not of a landscape and does not soley focus on the light = happiness idea. The main reason I used this picture was that at the end of the font poem, it described that happiness depends on the mind, so I used a picture of the mind to get that point across. The lights in the picture also demonstates the sparks of happiness that a person can obtain by using the mind. I placed this picture at the lower right corner where the word "MIND" is located.

What I found most challenging out of the entire project was getting the collage in its natural color behind the font poem. I easily merged the collage together and copyed it into the font poem. After I pasted the collage in, I moved the collage layer to the bottom of the order so that the words were over the collage. The problem was that after I moved the collage, the coloring were altered by the hues and saturation effects of the font poem. In the end, I had to remove the hue and saturation from the font poem and the coloring of the collage was normal.

When I finally got the collage behind the font poem, I realized that I had to change the colors of some of the words of the font poem. After I found out how to fix the collage coloring, I went back to the font poem and altered the colors of the words. Normally, I had the colors the way they were because of the hues and saturation effects, but now that they were removed, I could revert the words back to the colors I intended on using. However, I had to change some of the words to white or black so that they can be read over the collage.

I am most proud of how the animation time frame played out. I wanted people to easily read the font poem. I showed the entire font poem in a certain order so people can read the font poem in the following way.

• The font poem without the collage for 2 seconds
• The word "Happiness" for 5 seconds
• The phrase "is NOT a" for 5 seconds
• The word "MATTER" for 2 seconds
• The word "of" for 2 seconds
• The word "EVENTS" for 5 seconds
• The phrase "IT DEPENDS" for 5 seconds
• The word "UPON" for 2 seconds
• The word "the" for 2 seconds
• The word "TIDES" for 2 seconds
• The word "of" for 2 seconds
• The word "the" for 2 seconds
• The word "MIND" for 5 seconds
• The font poem with the collage for 5 seconds

If I had more time on this project, I would have edited the size of the background collage. When I started the project, my font poem was the required 640 x 480 pixels/inches. However, when I did my collage, the width size was different and smaller than I expected. Because of the time shortage, I was not able to fix the size to 640 x 480 and made the animation with the different width size. From my view, I think that was the only issue I had a problem with, and I did not have an idea to do something new.