Animated (Typo)graphics With Post-It Notes

  • Fonts in Use
Fonts in Use, ScreenFonts | Yves Peters | June 12, 2009

Stop motion is hot these days. I barely posted the terrific Text Island stop motion short with pegboard letters, and here’s already another superb-looking video.

Deadline is the senior project of Bang-yao Liu, student at Savannah College of Art and Design*. More than 6,000 Post-It notes in all kinds of different colours were used to produce a life-size pixel animation on the wall.
* Little bit of type trivia – the Savannah College of Art and Design logo is designed with John Downer‘s Vendetta which came up recently on The FontFeed.

Bang-yao Liu’s movie can be seen as an allegory on procrastination. As he explains in the information for his video on YouTube, the concept originated from the impression he gets that every time he is under pressure, he feels he is not struggling with his work, but with Post-It notes and deadlines. So he manipulated those Post-It notes to create a pixel-like stop motion animation, one that also interacts with a real actor. The movie is very impressive, full of humour, and the stop motion is flawless. Really neat are the references to operating system iconography and classic video games like Breakout and Pole Position.

The great thing is that Bang-yao Liu also posted a making of which explains how the video was shot. Although the final video does not use any computer generated imagery at all, the whole project was prepared on computer. We see early motion tests, and learn that the graphics and patterns were originally created in Adobe Illustrator. The finished graphics were then imported in Flash where the pre-animation was done. To ensure the interaction with the live actor would work it was simulated with animatics.

Planning the movie and creating all the graphics eventually took three months; shooting was done in four days. The animatics were projected on the wall to allow pasting the Post-Its in the exact positions. After checking the composite image on screen, the projector was covered and the image shot. Then the whole process of pasting, checking and shooting was repeated until the whole video was finished. The soundtrack for the video is Eple, the first hit by Röyksopp, with sound design by Shaun Burdick.

More stop motion animation with Post-Its on The FontFeed:

  • PsychoTypoGraph: Cocoe Are Mad for Typography
  • Trailer And Invitation Clips For 33pt. Conference

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10 Comments:

  1. “Rome” is burning while we all do our own version of fiddling.

    Posted by christopher on Jun. 12, 2009

  2. Thanks for posting! I love stop motion videos and this was pretty cool. Very nice.

    Posted by Megan Walker on Jun. 12, 2009

  3. That’s amazing. I did some stop-motion video almost 10 years ago and really appreciate the work and time that must have gone into this. I also enjoyed the video on the making of whole thing. Great job.

    Posted by Bryan Williams on Jun. 15, 2009

  4. Amazing effort, amazing patience – where did the inspiration come from? Pleasant diversion from normal daily routine – I totally empathise with character!

    Posted by Keith Barnett on Jun. 23, 2009

  5. This was stunning! Thanks for sharing :)

    Posted by Brendan on Jun. 23, 2009

  6. Awesome! Just read about this in the fontshop.de newsletter. I am wondering if you spontaneously made up the letters used for “DEAD” and “LINE” or if they were derived from a bitmap font.

    Posted by Max on Jun. 24, 2009

  7. 8) This is really awesome and what a pat on the back for post-its.

    Posted by Castielle on Jun. 24, 2009

  8. awesome! congrats!

    Posted by ivette on Aug. 8, 2009

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