tag: Animation-Nodes

For the fifth video in the Design Yourself series I was faced yet again with the task of doing a typewriter text effect. Yay… For each of the videos the participants wrote a poem to go with it. The poems were a really important part of the video so they needed to have a prominent role in the video beyond standard Youtube subtitles. At the time I was producing the video I didn’t yet know whether or not I wanted to use the typewriter text effect but I certainly wanted to explore it as a possibility. One of the first times I tried to achieve this was back in 2019 when I was making the video to promote the Algorave at the British Library.

For the Algorave at British Library in April I was asked to make a promotional video for it, which proved a difficult but for a very specific reason. I wanted to emphasise the liveness of live coding and show code being typed. For this I used the code supplied with Alex McLean aka Yaxu’s excellent Peak Cuts EP.

The effect of having the text appear word-by-word or letter-by-letter is often called the typewriter text effect. I’ve previously written about how to do this in Pure Data/GEM. I needed to have a bit more control than what I got in PD, and I needed to export as transparent pngs so this solution wouldn’t work.

Making digital art is quite a lengthy process and even moreso if you’re using non standard processes or making your own software. For awhile I’ve wanted to write about my processes and how I’ve overcome the bugs and problems. In what will hopefully be a regular series of blog posts I’m going to give a bit of insight into this process. In a way it’ll be a tutorial. Let’s go!