How to make a kinetic typography video from a reference
Upload the videos whose animation you want to Vizard Agent and say they define the motion language rather than the content. Vizard Agent samples frames from each reference, builds contact sheets, studies how the type actually moves, and animates your own words in that language.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say what the references are and are not. This is the one instruction that decides whether you get your film in their style or something closer to a remake of theirs, and it is worth stating in a full sentence. Two or three references that agree with each other give Vizard Agent more to work from than one, and the script should be final text.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Kinetic typography is easy to recognise and hard to describe, so the reference is the prompt. Vizard Agent spends the opening of the job taking the references apart. A contact sheet turns motion into something that can be looked at rather than watched, so the easing and rhythm get measured instead of guessed. In the session behind this article it:
- Checked the workspace for the attached files and loaded its kinetic typography guidance rather than improvising a method.
- Downloaded all three reference videos and checked each one's technical properties.
- Sampled frames from the references, then located the files and sampled again, the second pass catching timing a single look misses.
- Built contact sheets from those frames and read each reference in turn for how the type enters, holds and leaves.
- Animated the script in the derived language, delivering 38.73 seconds of 1920x1080 at 30fps, wide because the references were wide and the prompt asked for it.
When does this not work well?
Kinetic typography is unusually sensitive to the reference and the script length. Too much script for the time is the most common failure, and it's arithmetic, not craft. Three references in three different styles give Vizard Agent nothing to converge on, grain and glitch get read as part of the language, and a paragraph animated word by word is exhausting.
Common questions
How many references should I give it? Two or three. One works; more than one lets Vizard Agent tell what is essential from what is incidental.
Will it copy the reference's content? Not if you say the references define the animation language rather than the subject.
Can I get a vertical version? Yes. Vizard Agent re-lays the type rather than cropping, which is the only way vertical typography reads properly.