Rafael Braz | Gloob

Projects > Gloob | Gloob Playlist

The Gloob channel (the main children’s television channel in the Globo network) had a growing demand for “sing-along” style captioned music videos. Having the design and animation of the captions approved by the client, the challenge was to program customizable parameters that would provide that same appearance and movement to the text layers and, mainly, to allow production agility.

The animation is made entirely from expressions. It is divided into 3 moments and, in each of them, we can define the color of the text, the color of the stroke, and its thickness. It is also possible to define how much the text will scale, the inter-letter space, and the animation delay.

The incoming and outgoing of the animation occur through opacity and are also programmable. Their trigger is the beginning and the ending of the layer. The timing and type (ease ease, ease in, ease out, linear) are controlled through sliders. Depending on the tempo of the melody, there is also the option of using markers as a trigger for the animation.

Workflow

The first step is to paste the lyrics of the song in a text layer, with one sentence per line in the specified comp. In the main comp, there is a caption layer with the suffix number "1". This number relates to the lines of the text, that is, caption_4 shows line 4 of the song.

The second step is to generate the caption by duplicating this layer. With the animation, color, and timing parameters set, the third step is similar to the editing method.

The marker helps at various times, for instance, when two lines of text are needed at the same time for the caption to be read when accompanying the melody. The option makes the reference of the animation be the duration of the marker, not the tips of the layer; and if there is no duration, it will be used as a trigger and the animation will end with the layer.

The text layers “pull” one line at a time from the text entered as the song's lyrics and this function can also be explored in another way. In a melody with few words or when there is an emphasis on a specific word, the reading can become syllabic and longer than normal. In this case, we write one word per line to ensure individual control of words per text layer.