Tender Buttons, 2019

Through this project, we were supposed to choose one piece of poetry from TENDER BUTTONS by Gertrude Stein, and then develop a video which contains kinetic typography for it.

I chose the first paragraph of 'Apple'. Here’s the original poetry:

APPLE
Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.
A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.

And I did some research on it. In an essay, the author clarified that the series of poetries were actually experiments for the combination of sounds and words. Therefore from my perspective, adding another layer of sense could be rather interesting, so I made the typography 'tangible' and played with them.

For the process, I shot the stop motion video first, the hardest part was pretending that there were items and multiply them. Then I would import the video into my iPad and use an app ‘Rough Animator’ to draw the moving illustrations. After I would import the videos into After Effects and edit them together, and last but not least, I added the sound effects.

Down below is the link to the original poetry:
Tender Buttons / Gertrude Stein