Friday 22 November 2013

Crusader - Typography Animation review


A typography animation can succeed through creative ideas or a lot of personality. This video has neither.

Typography videos are hard to review. Unless they are especially good or especially bad, there really isn't much to say about them. So it's a good thing that this particular video is absolutely terrible.

It's not that it's all that badly done, or that it fails at being a typography video, but it's so utterly bland that it might as well not have even tried. The few ideas it has that are in any way original aren't very interesting, and it doesn't move nearly fast enough to make up for that. At one point, it actually recycles an idea from one of the animator's previous videos. And that's one of the more interesting points! More often than not it's just words appearing on the screen while the camera moves around.

The main font used here is terrible. It's incredibly mundane, lacks borders despite being white, and is entirely unrelated to the video's attempted tone. In fact, it's a large part of why this video does not work. The font is just so generic and devoid of personality that it drags the whole video down. But even ignoring the font, the animations don't get much more creative than words popping out from behind objects or Sweetie Belle walking on words in a slightly better font. At some points, it's barely even animated aside from the words and some small motions. This isn't necessarily bad on its own, but they have small bits of movement in them that make the still image-like remainder distracting.

Being a typography animation, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on it. It's just trying to show lyrics in a way slightly more interesting than just throwing them into a Windows Movie Maker video. I mean, it's definitely fluid. But in that case, the video would probably not be as varied as it is. That's definitely something I can praise here: It does have a little bit of variety. However, this variety only goes as far as switching into another bland, uncreative idea. In a fandom with some wonderfully creative typography videos, this is flat-out shameful.

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