Originally based off a typographic self-portrait of myself from a class assignment I did in school for my Graphic Design 1 class, I came up with the idea of making the type portrait into an animation.

The idea for the animation was to have the scattered individual letters of the type portrait slowly reveal the formation of my face to create an epic and cinematic feeling to it. The title of the video refers to the number of individual letters in the portrait, 17,976.

The animation was created with Blender, a free open-source 3D program. I imported the SVG file from Adobe Illustrator into Blender and applied a randomize transform effect. I tweaked the seed of the randomizer and adjusted the settings of the X-Y-Z axis of the location to make the letters scatter across the 3D space. All that was left was to set two animation keyframes for the randomizer from start to finish in the timeline and animate the camera angles.

After going through multiple test renders and eventually rendering the final animation that took a few hours, the next step was post-production. I stitched all of the frames together through Adobe After Effects, added a soundtrack, and rendered the final video through there. Thus, the animation was complete.

1080p/60fps

TIME: 1 minute and 33 seconds

DATE PUBLISHED: February 2024

Each area of the face and neck make up letters of my name.