It's a great project, and a wonderful read, thank you.
However, I can't resist pointing out something ironic in a post about a video about grammar:
> The number 27 is referenced at least seven different ways.
"Referenced" should be "referred to", or "The video makes reference to the number 27...".
Although I accept that this misuse of the word is so widespread that it will probably end up being accepted on the "if enough people make the mistake long enough and often enough, it ceases to be a mistake" theory of language...
Awesome and probably my favourite example of kinetic typography...
Can I ask how much one could hope to earn from such a project?
First I thought... $5000 on the low-end, as an after-hours hobby project for beer money, beats burger flipping.
Then I thought, well, this is equivalent to a one-time three-months full-time highly specialised consulting gig, has an audience of 50 million people, probably a highly integral part of the success of Al's song, included some subcontracting (to his brother), not a lot of people can do this... so this gotta be worth at least $50k (coming to $100/hour which again, seems just about right or again on the low-end for something like this).
He clearly massively overdelivered, I mean you can watch this thing frame by frame a dozen times and still discover tiny little details and jokes he included in the graphics, that's insane (in an awesome way) and you probably can't expect anyone to do that in a project spec up-front.
But then again, he's not doing this full-time, he's not a specialised business with a dozen GFX artists and if you'd quote $50k on this to a major corporation, they'd probably outsource it to a guy overseas (...) who'd be happy to try his luck for a thousand bucks or so.
>The result of 500 hours of work in After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere goes by in 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
that's pretty damn impressive.
It could be cool to have an indicator that shows how many hours put into something.
Gives more context, and a deeper meaning
All of the crimes outlined in the video are common, annoying, and clear except one: "well" vs "good". Even in the video, the "correct" usage is ambiguous.
IME people who care about grammar use (and correct others regarding) "I am well", but when I diagram the sentence, it seems like "I am good" is actually correct.
I'd really like to know the right usage, and what Weird Al intended here. It's funny, because all the other examples are really explicit.
When I first met with Al about this project, I was quick to point out that linguists would disagree with about a third of the "advice" he's giving out. His immediate reply was "WELL THEY'RE WRONG"--really loudly in the "Weird Al" character voice.
In my mind the joke is that the song's narrator is a know-it-all character that shouldn't be taken entirely seriously. But on the other hand, a lot of educators have contacted me to tell me they use the song as a learning tool.
At 2:39 it's saying that "doing good" and "doing well" are both correct, but mean different things: superman is doing good deeds, and scrooge is doing very well. But what to make of "I am good" isn't addressed (unless I missed it).
"Well" and "good" as predicate adjectives are both completely fine grammatically. Al's lyrics there are just telling people not to confuse the separate idiomatic meanings of "doing well" and "doing good".
For "I am well/good", I think what you have in mind is that there's a classic nitpick over which refers to health and which doesn't. Some people claim that "I am well" means the speaker is healthy, and object to using it otherwise or to using "good" with the same meaning (e.g. James Brown's "I feel good"). But I think most sources dismiss this claim as outdated or just confused, and consider both usages acceptable.
The first kind is clear mistakes: "its" versus "it's" is a good example here (in this case, driven by the fact that there is no aural distinction between the two, and that the possessive is designated by 's most of the time). Even the most hardcore descriptivist linguists would not object to marking these as errors.
The second kind is where language changes, and the speaker is trying to prevent the change. The figurative literally is the example of this "error" in the video; another well-known example is "decimate," whose original definition means to reduce by a tenth, but whose modern definition is vaguer in the exact amount, but usually more evocative of reducing to a tenth. It's not so much prescriptivism here as it is people wanting what is inherently dynamic to be static.
The final class of "error" is the entire class of constructs that lies in the debate of prescriptivism versus descriptivism. In some cases, such as the who/whom distinction, it has practically disappeared from the language in all but the most formal registers [1]. Some of these rules come from older English grammar that has weakened over time. Some come from people who imported the rules from Latin because they couldn't squeeze English grammar in classical Latin/Greek analysis, or they just thought it sounded better (most notably, prepositions and the placement thereof, or the splitting of infinitives). Some are merely thought to sound bad--the prohibition of passive voice falls in this category, despite the typical inability of adherents to identify their occurrence [2].
[1] It might be more accurate, from a descriptivist point of view, to label who as the correct pronoun in both the subject and object cases, and instead note "whom" as a variant of "who" in the object case that is used to indicate a degree of "showing off" one's knowledge of grammar.
[2] The sentence this footnote appears in has a usage of the passive voice. If you're uptight about not using the passive voice, then first correctly identify where it is. If you can't do that, then stop being uptight about it.
Love the song and video -- great to see the behind-the-scenes and in-jokes.
One thing I'm still curious about is the lyric: "You should never / write words using numbers / unless you're seven / or your name is Prince" -- particularly, whether it was an intentional reference to the movie "Se7en". If it was, it seems like a missed opportunity in the video.
Funny, I thought the symbol for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was informally pronounced and spelled "BRUCE", which is less cumbersome to speak and spell than the official alternative (which is unspeakable unspellable silence).
His PR company sent this memorandum around to the press and industry, including step-by-step downloading, installation, and usage instructions for Macintosh and PC, of a special [BRUCE] font with just one unpronounceable [BRUCE] symbol, to be used when referring to The Artist in print. I guess Weird Al didn't get the memo.
>Why, the ``Bruce'' font? Because someone jokingly suggested that because it was way too cumbersome to say, ``that symbol guy'' or whatever, it'd be much easier to give the symbol a name, and that name should be ``Bruce.'' So there.
>[BRUCE] Background: On June 7, 1993, mega-star Prince surprised fans and the entertainment industry when he announced that he was separating from his band New Power Generation and changing his name. At that time, the performer legally changed his name to the symbol "[BRUCE]", which has no verbal pronunciation or spelling. He did not reveal his reason for the change.
>The "[BRUCE]" is now the artist's legal name and should be used whenever referring to him in print. However the first time he is referenced in a story, you may wish to use the phrase "[BRUCE] (the artist formerly known as Prince)" to avoid confusion. Thereafter please use the [BRUCE] font.
>To obtain a copy of the [BRUCE] font, which can be easily installed on any Macintosh or IBM compatible PC, please contact Lisa McCormick, Lages & Associates at 714/453-8080. Or the fonts are available onlilne from CompuServe.
>To download the fonts from CompuServe, GO WBRECORDS after logging on, then SEARCH from the LIBRARIES menu for PRNFON.ZIP (for the PC version) or PRNFON.SIT (for the Macintosh). Please follow the instructions in the readme file for any updates on how to load the font on your computer. The fonts are located in Library 2 (the Warner Bros. Library).
Want the Original Prince Symbol Font? Here You Go...
>Though it's become an undeniable piece of musical iconography and a supreme emblem of everything he represents, the meaning of Prince's symbol actually goes far deeper than being just an exercise in artistic branding. Chosen for its impracticality and difficulty to reproduce, the symbol was a way for a fed-up Prince to mess with Warner Bros., his record label, who were critical of the speed of his output, as a way to negotiate the contract he had with them.
>In 1993, when Prince changed his name to an untypeable and unspeakable symbol, it caused problems beyond his record label. Music journalists everywhere had no way that they could feature him in their publications without having a name. So, Prince came up with the perfect solution, creating his very own custom-designed font which substituted a capital P with Prince's symbol.
"Word Crimes" is Weird Al's spot-on parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" with T.I. and Pharrell Williams. I think Weird Al's version is better and more educational than the original -- smart and catchy like a modern Schoolhouse Rock.
Weird Al contacted Jarrett Heather after being impressed by "Shop Vac", his previous work with kinetic text (typographic animation), which he made using animation tools like AfterEffects.
This page on Jarrett Heather's web site tells the story and shows the art and technology behind the "Word Crimes" video. He's also published the Animatic storyboard-in-motion that took about 100 hours, to Weird Al's original home-made demo of the song! It's fascinating to compare them, and see how their ideas evolved from storyboard to final video.
>The Completed Music Video: In November 2013, "Weird Al" Yankovic asked me to direct an animated video for "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" about the supposed abuse of proper language.
>The result of 500 hours of work in After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere goes by in 3 minutes, 44 seconds. I hope you find each one of them entertaining.
>This storyboard-in-motion took about 100 hours. Al signed off on this design on January 25th, 2014, only 3 weeks after he gave me his homemade "demo" for Word Crimes, which you can hear on the animatic soundtrack.
>If you watch very closely, you might notice a gag or two that didn't make it through to final animation or some very subtle changes in the lyrics.
Jarrett originally designed the Live Journal logo back in 2000 or so, and parodied it in the video, with a broken pencil tip.
Here's a great "Local Boy Makes Good" article and TV interview about Jarrett Heather from around the time the video came out, that was previously posted to HN -- I love his down-to-earth advice:
Elk Grove animator thrives as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s partner in ‘Word Crimes’:
I'm delighted your stopped by! Thanks to you and Weird Al for all of your dastardly animated criminal words.
Your Shop Vac cartoon led me to discover Jonathan Coulton's other geeky music, like Code Monkey! He makes his songs available via the Creative Commons license, so people have made some really cool videos to them, including yours.
>Jonathan Coulton is a singer/songwriter who releases his songs via the Creative Commons license, which enables projects such as this video. Through his "Thing A Week" podcast, Jonathan has put out a clever, creative song like this one every week for a year.
>Mike Spiff Booth is a Program Manager at Adobe who though this great song really deserved a video.
>Before you ask, since apes, goblins, and night elf receptionists don't tend to interact much in the wild, I couldn't only use captured game footage to make this video. Every frame of this video was composited together by hand using images captured from the WoW Model Viewer, WoW Map Viewer, and the World of Warcraft game itself.
>No monkeys were harmed in the making of this film.
>Please visit www.spiffworld.com for more information about my videos, including info about how I make them.
>The song at the end of the video is "Big Bad World One", another great Jonathan Coulton song.
>This was an animation that was done in about 2 1/2 weeks. My friend Tom Weiser and I wanted to put together a short for a free ASIFA event. We are both fans of Jonathan Coulton so we figured a music video would be fun. I know Code Monkey already has a lot of videos made of it, but having worked as a web design/developer for the government...well how could I not?! I hope everyone enjoys it.
>Code Monkey Jonathan Coulton Lyrics Kinetic Typography (shorter version). Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for releasing his music under the creative commons license!
>Tenth song- Code Monkey.
Recorded live at Temple Bar Santa Monica CA.
October 9 2006.
Code monkey like this song.
MP3s of this performance graciously made available at spiffworld.com. Check out his amazing JoCo/WoW videos too.
I remember going through my insufferable 14 year old phase where I thought that video was the shit. Now I will gladly deck anyone who thinks it's good.
