
Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes (2014) - DonHopkins
https://jarrettheather.com/wordcrimes/
======
MrHeather
Creator here. I'm happy to answer any questions about the project.

~~~
fnordprefect
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...

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imagine99
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.

What do you think? I'm just curious.

~~~
MrHeather
Any profit the video makes is shared equally between myself, Weird Al, and
Sony. So far that hasn't added up to $50k, sadly.

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thereyougo
>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

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appleflaxen
Great video!

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.

~~~
mcabbott
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).

~~~
cafard
As in Tom Lehrer's song "The Old Dope Peddler", which ends "It's the old dope
peddler/Doing well by doing good."

It's not something I heard years ago, but then one heard "I'm OK" and "I'm
fine".

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jcl
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.

~~~
bitwize
The actual joke was the reference to Prince -- the only artist to consistently
refuse Al's requests to parody his music.

~~~
lonelappde
Yes but not the point of parent comment.

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lonelappde
> The result of 500 hours of work in After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and
> Premiere goes by in 3 minutes, 44 seconds.

1000:1 ratio of input to output.

------
DonHopkins
Jarrett Heather is the artist behind Weird Al's "Word Crimes" video released
in 2014 (at 48.4 million views now).

Word Crimes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc)

"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.

Blurred Lines:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU)

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.

Shop Vac:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sOfO8Ei1g](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/](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](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 originally designed the Live Journal logo back in 2000 or so, and
parodied it in the video, with a broken pencil tip.

[https://jarrett.livejournal.com/208198.html](https://jarrett.livejournal.com/208198.html)

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’:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140725043615/https://www.sacbe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140725043615/https://www.sacbee.com/2014/07/17/6564802/elk-
grove-animator-captures-spotlight.html)

Common Ground - Jarrett Heather “Word Crimes” Music Video Artist

[https://vimeo.com/103615214](https://vimeo.com/103615214)

>"If I did fail, it would have been Al's fault for hiring a software developer
to make a cartoon."

>Word Crimes is 244 seconds long. Each second took two hours at the computer.
500 hours work, in all.

>"Yeah, no classes, just, you know. I think people really underestimate the
value of just sitting down and reading the manual."

~~~
MrHeather
Thank you for the kind words, Don.

~~~
DonHopkins
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Coulton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Coulton)

[https://www.jonathancoulton.com/](https://www.jonathancoulton.com/)

Shop Vac:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sOfO8Ei1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sOfO8Ei1g)

Code Monkey videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA)

>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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg)

>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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE)

>This AMV features the song Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton, using footage
from the anime Black Heaven.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWrjYdD0Tg0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWrjYdD0Tg0)

>Code Monkey Jonathan Coulton Lyrics Kinetic Typography (shorter version).
Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for releasing his music under the creative commons
license!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4TnhemCEmc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4TnhemCEmc)

>Jonathan Coulton in LA -10-Codemonkey

>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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUbp_d2DkYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUbp_d2DkYU)

>Jonathan Coulton re-recorded Code Monkey for Slashdot's 15th Birthday

>Rob Malda: I was stunned when this arrived in my inbox from JoCo... a huge
thanks to him for the song, and of course Happy Birthday Slashdot.

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imulligan
I just shared the video with my children who are studying film and animation,
it was just great

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qqssccfftt
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.

~~~
tashi
Scorn can feel more mature than enthusiasm to a young person, but if you're
lucky that's just a phase too.

~~~
qqssccfftt
Given that the video is entirely scornful prescriptivism, I'm glad to be
scornful over anyone who likes it.

~~~
DonHopkins
It's like spitting on a fish.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ)

