The kinetic typography engine: an extensible system for animating expressive text

  • Authors:

  • Johnny C. Lee;Jodi Forlizzi;Scott E. Hudson

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Kinetic typography --- text that uses movement or other temporal change --- has recently emerged as a new form of communication. As we hope to illustrate in this paper, kinetic typography can be seen as bringing some of the expressive power of film --- such as its ability to convey emotion, portray compelling characters, and visually direct attention --- to the strong communicative properties of text. Although kinetic typography offers substantial promise for expressive communications, it has not been widely exploited outside a few limited application areas (most notably in TV advertising). One of the reasons for this has been the lack of tools directly supporting it, and the accompanying difficulty in creating dynamic text. This paper presents a first step in remedying this situation --- an extensible and robust system for animating text in a wide variety of forms. By supporting an appropriate set of carefully factored abstractions, this engine provides a relatively small set of components that can be plugged together to create a wide range of different expressions. It provides new techniques for automating effects used in traditional cartoon animation, and provides specific support for typographic manipulations.