Typography and Motion Graphics - Pre-Order Now!

story © Michael Betancourt | published August 6, 2018 | permalink |  |  

Typography and Motion Graphics: The 'Reading-Image'
Hardback (ISBN 9780367029289) expected on 2018-12-01

In his latest book, Michael Betancourt explores the nature and role of typography in motion graphics as a way to consider its distinction from static design, using the concept of the ‘reading-image’ to model the ways that motion typography dramatizes the process of reading and audience recognition of language on-screen. Using both classic and contemporary title sequences—including The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Alien (1979), Flubber (1998), Six Feet Under (2001), The Number 23 (2007) and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)—Betancourt develops an argument about what distinguishes motion graphics from graphic design. Moving beyond title sequences, Betancourt also analyzes moving or kinetic typography in logo designs, commercials, film trailers, and information graphics, offering a striking theoretical model for understanding typography in media.

story © Michael Betancourt | published June 12, 2018 | permalink |  |  

The collapse of value for Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies is likely to be inevitable.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 27, 2018 | permalink |  |  

Reading is a particular engagement with letterforms guided by the audience’s familiarity with written and textual languages, a distinct and parallel mode of engagement from their visual perceptions: an encounter that resolves the visuality::legibility dynamic into a “natural” hierarchy where legibility always dominates. In contradistinction to how motion graphics overlap with some of the concerns established in graphic design’s use of typography, their superficial relationship to established methodology does not alter the essential difference that movement and development-over-time makes for lexical recognition. Motion typography allows a delay in this assertion of order without undermining or challenging it by presenting the process of lexical recognition as the emergence of legibility: the separation between the recognition of language, and the ability to identify and read the contents presented. This procedural demonstration expands the autonomous and internalized activity of recognition—interpretation into the emergence of letterforms, allowing the transition from illegible to legible to become an expressive subject. This excess arises in the three modes kinetic, graphic, and chronic that define this semiotic process immanent in/as the “making sense” of letterforms in motion. The distinct engagements with non-lexical dimensions of typography and design these modes provide have their foundations in static typography and the printed page, but exceed them because the addition of motion is transformative, allowing the presentation of interpretive processes through animated motion.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 22, 2018 | permalink |  |  

I have a short write-up called "Postcinema, Motion Perception and Glitch Movies" on my work with glitches and their relationship to postcinema in issue 15 (their issue focusing on experimental film and video) of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies.

Betancourt, Michael. "Postcinema, Motion Perception and Glitch Movies." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 202–208.
doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.242

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 9, 2018 | permalink |  |  

The next Exploding Cinema event at The Horse Hospital in London on 21 April 2018 will be screening Going Somewhere: Episode One. Look at their Facebook page for more information!