Typography and Motion Graphics: The 'Reading-Image'

Michael Betancourt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429627835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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.

THE ‘READING-IMAGE’

The three modes of ‘reading-image’ depend on audience recognitions of visual form and lexical form as equally significant to interpretation:

1.a kinetic action encompasses discrete movements independent of the overall kinesis of the typography

2.a graphic expression employs visual forms that shift in role between being-image and being-typography

3.a chronic progression refers to the emergence of meaning across the design as a whole, a function of its duration and the complete series of movements and actions shown on-screen

Motion graphics expands the implicit time of lexical recognition into a literal duration, which the ‘reading-image’ demonstrates as the essential difference between motion and static typography. These modulations enable a playing-out on-screen of the interpretive process, externalizing what in static designs are internal recognitions as the visuality and presentation of the motion typography itself. The delay of lexical recognition versus immanent encounter becomes an oppositional activity that ‘externalizes’ the thought process of reading as/in the appearance-presentation of the text. These identifications define motion graphics via kinesis as fundamentally unlike graphic design.

1Kinetic Action

Typography occupies an obvious overlap between the established and well-theorized field of graphic design and the newer, under-theorized field of motion graphics. The relevance and relationship of the formal models of graphic design for motion pictures are a topic of theoretical and critical dispute, with some historians and theorists of motion graphics arguing for a continuity and applicability of the conventions of static typography to the animated designs of motion pictures.¹ Differences between moving typography and static typography are typically masked by discussions that confuse formal issues of visuality::legibility with theory. These engagements begin by assuming the fundamental similarity of motion and static design—especially that typography remains constant, always determined, establishing a fixed role in semiosis—leading to the fallacy that motion graphics is a fusion of graphic design with the techniques of movement developed in animation; denying the relevance of cinema semiotics for motion graphics accompanies this category error.

Although animated logos, information graphics, and other types of moving design have been an aspect of motion pictures almost since their inception in the 1890s, their production and complexity have changed over time as new technologies that are cheaper, more efficient, and offer greater precision became standard practices. These changes enabled the increased complexity evident in the progression from early motion pictures that emphasized hand-animation to contemporary digital software that automates many of the most repetitious parts of the production process and allows a dynamic integration of animation with photography. This technical shift has been especially revolutionary for motion typography, enabling it to become commonplace and nearly invisible. However, this digital revolution has only impacted the means of production, leaving the foundational morphology and structure of their historical origins in animation intact. The addition of motion (and thus of organized time) to the otherwise immanent and static constructions of graphic design is basically transformative. The change from immanence (static design) to emergence (motion design) requires the same dynamic planning and orchestration common to cinema generally—in both animation and live action—situating motion graphics as an intermediary between them, incorporating both types of moving image. Equating the organization and theorization of all motion typography with the static typography of graphic design thus reflects a category error.

Viewers organize their perceptions by assigning category membership: positioned before any particular statement or meaning, category assignment² establishes all engagements within ranges of potential prior to their higher-level signification. These identifications typically happen autonomously, allowing the process of reading text, the dynamic of visuality::legibility, to occur almost instantaneously: perception is contingent, but at the same time entangled with cultural knowledge learned and gained through past experiences. The ‘reading-image’ is a modulated delay in this identification, its spacing-out as a series of visual and non-lexical identities, each articulated in itself, rather than as a singular, direct recognition that reads the text. This modal shift considers visual form as significance; however, even transforming seeing into reading requires training, a learned process, limited by fluency in the particular language itself. The fleeting perceptual encounter identified by Michel Foucault’s ‘enunciative function’ describes the recognition of form and imagery in the arrangement of ‘signs’—language—enabling audiences to understand a particular and ‘precise’ application of their internalized knowledge (the dynamic of visuality::legibility). Encultured protocols for semiosis and the grammatical order thus create the possibility for meaning:

The statement is neither a syntagma, nor a rule of construction, nor a canonic form of succession and permutation; it is that which enables such groups of signs to exist, and enables these rules or forms to become manifest. But although it enables them to exist, it does so in a special way—a way that must not be confused with the existence of signs as elements of a language (langue), or with the material existence of those marks that occupy a fragment of space or last for a variable length of time.³

Foucault’s semiotic hierarchy of reading–seeing–hearing enables an ‘aura of textuality’ to envelop the visual, apparent in the recognition of text, informing and overriding its visuality in the same way that semiosis elides the letterforms as they are subsumed into words and interpreted as the meaning conveyed. To assign the category of ‘language’ to any encounter is to presume an intentional purpose, that it communicates something, even or especially when that meaning remains unknown. Any freedom from imposed orders must be actively created for static texts, a choice not to follow the trained progression into signification; in motion typography this change from visuality to legibility can become an element of its presentation on-screen, a rendering of lexical engagement as immanent encounter. Semiosis for typography in motion accentuates rather than denies the dynamic of visuality::legibility, adding entirely novel dimensions of a literally temporal emergence, development, and recognition to what is already a complex interplay of perception and lexical expertise. The identification of language—type—that is reading depends on a particular engagement guided by the audience’s familiarity with written languages, a distinct and parallel mode of engagement from their visual perceptions. The textual encounter is independent of any imagery appearing alongside the text, and requires the letterforms to assume an identity apart from graphic marks—a becoming-words that is the linguistic. 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 methodologies for static design does not alter the essential difference that movement on-screen and development over time makes for lexical recognition. Movement entails a becoming.

Complicating visuality::legibility are theories of motion as an expressive part of narrative cinema that are commonly and logically focused on the dynamics of the shot. This concern is foundational to Giles Deleuze’s analysis of the ‘movement-image’ in Cinema 1, but offers a theorization explicitly and only concerned with the arrangement and development of narrative fictions—any consideration of graphic, animated, or moving elements beyond these strictures is outside the scope of his analysis, yet the discussion of kinetics converges on his concerns with the expressivity of movement; the differences lie with what is being expressed. The mismatch between Deleuze’s theory and the composed, precisely determinate, and controlled actions of the animated film is an immediate feature of his ‘movement’ in the autonomous recording of kinematography:

The image of the cinema being, therefore, ‘automatic’ and presented primarily as movement-image, we have considered under what conditions it is specifically defined into different types. These types are, principally, the perception-image, the affection-image and the action-image. Their distribution certainly does determine a representation of time, but it must be noted that time remains the object of an indirect representation in so far as it depends on montage and derives from movement-images.⁴

Animation does not ‘fit’ this elemental description of motion: it is constructed, a fabricated invention composed by manipulating the interpreted changes created inbetween the frames shown on-screen: the suggestion of its being a material trace of the apparent reality shown on-screen is simply ridiculous; with digitally generated elements this indexicality, however tenuous, vanishes. The higher-level decomposition of ‘movement-image’ into subtypes retains the imprint of this initial capturing of an autonomous reality. The typology that Deleuze offers specifically cannot describe the animated film, and thus cannot describe the kinesis of typographic motion with his ‘movement-image.’ The unity of the shot that allows its fragmentation makes an interpretation of the world shown. The types of ‘movement-image’ Deleuze identifies are fundamentally and irreducibly narrative: instances of a presented ‘perception’ connected to a character (dream, hallucination, subjective view), ‘affection’ (the visible space as an arena for/awaiting action), or ‘action’ (the continuity of cause–effect within/across a series of shots). They rely on the premise of a world-on-film that corresponds to the parameters of experiential reality and whose causality continues to apply in cinema. This basis is a contingency in animation, which unlike the live action motion picture must not automatically correspond to the assumptions of reality, nor does its presence on-screen extend beyond the parameters of its appearance in the shot. It is not appropriate to talk about animated events not ‘captured’ by the camera, what happened before the shot, or after its conclusion. In the artificial construction of the animated film, there is no before or after, only what appears on-screen—shots whose contents are plastic and contingent—contradicting the conception of dureé taken from Henri Bergson’s philosophy that is the exploratory premise of Deleuze’s proposal. The observational basis of the ‘movement-image’ lies with its encoding as a trace of lived changes seen in the world and held for analysis/consideration in/as the narrative constructions familiar from fiction films, thereby enabling their comprehension through the justifications of narration and fabula. Distinguishing the ‘reading-image’ reveals inherent differences arising in the role of narrative for Deleuze’s typology and its connection to the indexicality of photography, giving the ‘reading-image’ a general relevance for digital cinema, animation, motion graphics, and VFX.

The precession of images within the ‘movement-image’ all depend on the extractive nature of live action kinematography employed for narrative (if not fictive) purposes. The ‘perception-image’ is a narrative construction of how the shot fits within the fabula; it is an e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Motion Typography
• The ‘Reading-Image’
• Index