SMASH Academy: Mind The Opportunity Gap

We needed a new video to showcase SMASH Academy and highlight the fact that the program is starting to scale to other college campuses in 2011. With all of the text-based animated videos out there, we figured we'd try our hand at putting our own touch on this style of "kinetic typography".

Instead of using only text, as many kinetic typography videos do, we figured we might as well use the assets we have on our team and incorporate some illustrations from our very own Jake Mix. We had very little time to produce this video, so instead of having Jake create illustrations from scratch, we picked a series of photos of actual SMASH students that we felt best illustrated the message of the video. The most exciting part of course though was all of the animation. Unlike most animators, I decided to use Final Cut Pro to do this entire video... Why? Because, I like it, seriously, that's it. We could have likely created this in Apple Motion or Adobe After Effects, but when you have little time

The purpose was to highlight the opportunity gap and demonstrate the ways in which SMASH Academy bridgest that gap for talented young students of color. To this end, I tried to create an actual object out of the word opportunity, and split it in half at the "T", to create what seemed likes a gaping whole in the word. This is the beauty of text based art— words are symbols for ideas as they are, but they can also be turned into images that represent the same idea, or different ideas all together. In this case, we used letters to symbolize opportunity, and the image of the word "opportunity" split in half to symbolize a gap. Throughout the rest of the video, there are other instances where a single word, or even a collection of words are arranged as an image to symbolize an additional idea. Pretty neat, huh?

The video is now being show at high schools across the San Francisco Bay Area as a recruitment tool to encourage thousands of high school freshmen to apply to SMASH.