Lexical Legacy
The Details
Client: Truman State University English & Linguistics Department
Task: create a motion piece to accompany pre-recorded, informational text
Purpose: To showcase the department’s knowledge and communication in order to reach prospective high school students
Software used: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Media Encoder
End product: roughly six and a half minutes worth of animated content
The Background
The desire of the Truman State University English & Linguistics department was to create a series of informative, animated videos to help promote themselves to high school students looking to further their education in the field. The videos were to be fresh, modern, simple and fun.
The Process
When I joined the team to work on Lexical Legacy, there was already one video in the department’s series that had been made. This video set many of the rules that mine would go on to follow (such as keeping simple backgrounds, simple animations and a more informative/less-narrative visual structure), however, I was given relatively full creativity when it came to color, design, and what would be shown on screen. Taking 74 hours to complete (not including the storyboarding process), Lexical Legacy features 36 unique characters, and 38 unique background assets all designed in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, animated in After Effects, and exported using Media Encoder. The voices were recorded by other members of the team and the music used was from the YouTube Studio library.
Abstracting the Abstract
One of the most challenging parts of this project was the initial conceptualization. I was given the script that you hear being read in the video and told to create a series of animated visual assets… but many of the topics the video discusses aren’t things you can see! They’re concepts and ideas and pronunciations. What do you imagine visually when you hear the phrase “sociolinguistic change”? There’s a phrase in the script where it said that German is a sort of distant cousin to English, and this inspired the idea of a family tree, and the family tree inspired the idea that languages could be represented anthropomorphically. Similar to the bill in School House Rock or the mind workers in Pixar’s Inside Out, by giving personality to abstract concepts, I was able to choose from a much wider pool of visual cues that more clearly represented what the video was trying to say.
Assets, Assets & More Assets
Lexical Legacy contains the most assets I’ve ever made for a single project (36 characters and 38 environment assets). Developing these assets is where most of my time was spent on this project. This taught me a lot about efficiency and asset organization which has been very helpful when tackling new projects.