Dynamic Typography
I'm fascinated with kinetic typography, especially the work of Lawrence Lessig. If you like to see more of the genre you can go search google.
I wanted to do my own. I could always try using open office Impress or PowerPoint, but they are too limited in what they can do and repeating the same fancy effect on two slides takes twice as long.
My first attempt was to use the Processing language, but it was a lot of work and the language is less than ideal (sort of old school).
My second attempt was with PyGame, which I've been meaning to learn more about. It could work, but I found that the font's weren't anti-aliased (but I think I was doing it wrong) and creating the library was proving to take a long time.
The I remembered Bruce, a presentation program written in Python and supposedly using PyGame. When I downloaded the latest source, I found that it was using Pyglet and Cocos2d instead. These two were exactly what I needed, powerful and flexible and I could animate a bunch of objects at the same time independently.
I've found for each slide I need:
- List of objects (the words):
- For each object:
- it's initial setup (usually offscreen)
- it's "on animation"
- it's "off animation"
Doing transitions between slides is easy with cocos2d, but I normally just use a quick fade transition.
The code is still rough, my aim is to have a library of effects so that doing a cool presentation won't require too much work.
The code lives at code.google.com.
I wanted to do my own. I could always try using open office Impress or PowerPoint, but they are too limited in what they can do and repeating the same fancy effect on two slides takes twice as long.
My first attempt was to use the Processing language, but it was a lot of work and the language is less than ideal (sort of old school).
My second attempt was with PyGame, which I've been meaning to learn more about. It could work, but I found that the font's weren't anti-aliased (but I think I was doing it wrong) and creating the library was proving to take a long time.
The I remembered Bruce, a presentation program written in Python and supposedly using PyGame. When I downloaded the latest source, I found that it was using Pyglet and Cocos2d instead. These two were exactly what I needed, powerful and flexible and I could animate a bunch of objects at the same time independently.
I've found for each slide I need:
- List of objects (the words):
- For each object:
- it's initial setup (usually offscreen)
- it's "on animation"
- it's "off animation"
Doing transitions between slides is easy with cocos2d, but I normally just use a quick fade transition.
The code is still rough, my aim is to have a library of effects so that doing a cool presentation won't require too much work.
The code lives at code.google.com.
Comments
I've considered just modifying Bruce and it did give me the inspiration to use cocos2d. At the moment I think I'll continue in this mode, since it looks like it would be more flexible, but I'm already seeing some elements that could be put into Bruce.