Dancing Typography

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up

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In this experiment/new visual effect, the letters from a lyric of a popular song – Never Gonna Give You Up — are repositioned to compose the images of its singer — Rick Astley — dancing in fluid motion. Take a look of it here.

It is an evolution of an experiment I did a month ago where text compose a static image. In this case, I modified the algorithm to achieve the smooth motion by making the  letters move the less as possible to be adapted to the next frame in the video.

As the previous experiment, this was thought to be done with Javascript/CSS, but I’ve finally had to recode it in Flash because the Javascript version was too slow rendering. This is why it is done with Arial font, so a big sorry to typography purists about it.

I’ve included an slider to morph from the lyrics to the video and two checkboxes, one for a interesting slow motion video where it is possible to see in detail how the letters move to create the different frames and a cinematic motion blur that also helps to see the motion, but that unfortunately requires a very fast computer to render at full speed. I hope you enjoy it!