Hi, discovered your vid through 'Bad Astronomy' blog who found it through reddit.

i really enjoyed this. There are lots of little fun things you did with the text. my only quibble was that you built up the text into the title (shown at the end) a few times, and i think you should have shown the title in its form, at least briefly, each time.

Well, my! That was fantastic! I need to read this full essay; though I doubt it would be nearly so mind-catching. This morning, I need to have fallen back in lust with the English language a bit, and look forward to putting some interesting, not nit-picky, phrases together today.
Is it terribly odd and unnecessary that I got a tear in my eye with the desire to bring my creative energies back to the surface, sitting at my desk of software testing technicality? Whatever the evaluation, I think I'll just enjoy it and go about my way. Thank you, Matthew and Stephen.

This is absolutely AMAZING. The typesetting is gorgeous. The text is perfect; Fry is batting 1000 here. This is a really heroic move.

very, very well done. That would of been a lot of layers to animate in ae.

I did a kinetic type piece last year, and it had like 450 works and it was a lot of hours work.

"a verbing too far"... love it.

Thoughtful and interesting, but I wonder if the same power to persuade would be contained in a message that didn't broadly conform to those grammatical rules that are the target.

Brilliant! Typography can always look amazing but for me its always about what the artist chooses to use as audio. Great choice of audio, and great animation.

Awesome and well done. As an AE user I have some idea of the work involved in this and also as a person who enjoys 'playing' with the English language, I love it.

Just curious whether you've seen Prezi and how much of what you did here you think could, with some effort, be done with that web tool. (Nicely done here, btw.)

I love it, it's quite simply the best words for a typographic video.
My only concern would be that the camera movement is in my opinion too constant. The whole work would have been that much better with a little more variation.

But dude, hats off to you, great work.

Nice work!

Very accomplished and at least you didn't have to accommodate a Fryism such as "perspicacious pulchritudinousness". I imagine a lot of hours went into this, but the initial impact is the most important part – my only question would be whether it needs to be that long, as it is quite hard to concentrate on written and spoken words at the same time (well, it is for me anyway). But these are minor gripes - all round a brilliant, clever and witty endeavour, and makes my efforts seem unambitious in comparison ... vimeo.com/10445527

117K viewers! Well deserved Great idea, well executed!

I loved this! I want to know how it is done :)

Really enjoyed this!

Very nice job putting this together, and Stephen Fry is great. Well done!

Wonderful stuff: well done!

This is awesome stuff. I didn't know that this (Kinetic Typography) had a name. I listen to a lot of French language music (such as Nadiya) and have long thought that a subtitled Music Video that included kinetic typography for the French words and normal style subtitling of the English translation would be awesome and could even be a training tool. Having the actual music video going on in addition to both language's text might be too busy and it might need to be on a plain background but still... So you did all this with AE?

Great clip, but to be honest I enjoyed the audio alone. Inflection within the human voice communicates enough without very timed words flying out of the periphery...

Splendid!

Regarding the essay itself, I love language and I love clever new uses of it, but I still cringe at many of the things that Stephen Fry seems to be saying we should rise above cringing at. I wonder if he would include Sarah Palin on his list of those who dared to ignore convention, like Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot, when she used the word "refudiate." Nicely done animation. I think adding an occasional image instead always just using the actual words would make it more compelling. All in all, fun to listen to and watch. Thanks for making this.

Hey Matt, thanks for this. Creative and enjoyable. As a daily user of the same tools, I applaud you for taking the time, and for doing it so well.

Sidney Landau, in the excellent book, "Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography," wrote,

"The record plainly shows that most people of all classes customarily make no distinction between disinterested and uninterested or between nauseated and nauseous, yet critics continue to note the alleged differences in urgent or melancholy tones. Such a fastidious attitude serves to mark the critic as belonging to a high social class. The situation is analogous to that of a guest remarking on transposed forks in the place settings at a dinner table. As Dwight Bolinger puts it: ‘The lie-lay distinction is fragile and impractical, and the price of maintaining it is too high. But that is exactly what makes it so useful as a social password: without the advantage of a proper background or proper schooling, you fail." (p. 256)

Landau suggests that the reason people are so exercised about language is that it is a marker of class distinction.

I do agree with most of what Fry says (both in this particular essay and in general) but I have to make a comment on his dismissal of the "fight for clarity."

I rarely get involved in the petty bickering about minor grammatical points or things like that, but the few times I have I think that it has genuinely been for the sake of clarity.

For instance, I was recently in a discussion where someone used the word "opaque" when he actually meant "transparent." When someone corrected him on this he got upset at the "grammar-Nazis" and informed us that he has the right to use language his way. He pointed out, just like Fry does, that language changes and that similar changes where a word goes to having the opposite meaning of what it used to have happened before. He also said that he knows plenty of other people who use opaque to mean transparent, so we need to stop worshiping a stagnant language and accept that words change meaning over time.

And it's true that words change meaning over time and we should accept that. But I don't think that this means that I have to accept that a word suddenly goes to having the exact opposite meaning of what it used to have. I think that there is a real, distinct issue of clarity there and it most certainly confuses me if I don't know if a person means 'A' or 'B' when they use a word, especially when 'B' is the opposite of 'A'.

Additionally, a professional and brilliant wordsmith like Fry can perhaps not really appreciate another lack of clarity that can arise. Like I said before, I normally don't bicker about minor grammatical points (like a missing or extra apostrophe for instance), but I do still wish that people would be more careful sometimes. That isn't me feeling any pleasure from being needlessly irritated by such unimportant errors, but is in fact about clarity again - this time because English isn't my first language.

Since my English isn't perfect, I read English slower than a typical native speaker. This leads to me noticing mistakes more easily, especially in the case of homophones. Normally, if we read a text quickly, our brain seems to process text directly into sound and we often don't notice if the wrong homophone is used - it all sounds right in our heads. But if we read slower and more carefully, we actually notice the exact words used and sentences start to break down.

This happens to me often when people misuse "your" to mean "you're" or vice versa. Where a native speaker might not even notice the mistake, I get confused at first and have to struggle a bit to understand the sentence. Normally I feel like there are missing words - if for instance I read a sentence like "Your so pale" I immediately realize that it doesn't make sense but I have to think a while before I understand what the problem is and what the sentence is supposed to say. Same with misuse of "it's" versus "its", et cetera.

So for me it is about clarity. I try not to be a douche about it though, even if I do sometimes feel the need to stress the importance of following grammatical rules.

Sorry to say that those of us who can't handle movies that use hand-held camera are also badly affected by this wildly distracting overuse of kinetics. I guess I don't see the point. I'll read this little essay instead of trying this one again.

Excellent! Many reasons why, but here's one I'll share that instantly jumped at me: I see everything I hear. Yes, all the time. And if there is no picture to go with what I hear, I see the words. In fact, I not only see the picture, but also the non-picture words - such as "Look at the blue sky!" I see the blue sky, but I also see the text, "Look at the blue..." So this was wonderful to watch!

I Love Everything about this!

Omg!! i love everything about this video!!! :)