Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes (2014)
jarrettheather.com
jarrettheather.com
>"Yeah, no classes, just, you know. I think people really underestimate the value of just sitting down and reading the manual."
Word Crimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
Weird Al's spot-on parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" with T.I. and Pharrell Williams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU
Weird Al contacted him after being impressed by "Shop Vac", his previous work with kinetic text (typographic animation), which he made using animation tools like AfterEffects.
Shop Vac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sOfO8Ei1g
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.
Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes: https://jarrettheather.com/wordcrimes/
>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.
The Animatic: https://vimeo.com/102959171
>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 designed the Live Journal logo in 2000 or so, and parodied it in the video, with a broken pencil tip.
https://jarrett.livejournal.com/208198.html
Here's an article about Jarrett Heather from around the time the video came out, that was previously posted to HN:
Elk Grove animator thrives as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s partner in ‘Word Crimes’: https://web.archive.org/web/20140725043615/https://www.sacbe...