ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes how the ‘avant-pop’ transformation of the abstract traditions of ‘visual music’ became motion graphics, using the title sequence as an illustration. Motion graphics encompasses a diversity of production techniques, ranging from ray-traced 3D computer animations to optically printed composite cinematography and traditional cel animation. Synchronisation links abstract forms to music, equally demonstrating and reinforcing the link between motion graphics and earlier visual music animations. When motion graphics employ music, they follow the model of visual music animations, linking the design directly to the score. Some contemporary designs engage with this history of visual music and experimental animation more-or-less explicitly, producing designs that invite contemporary audiences to draw on their encyclopedic knowledge of both motion graphics and abstract film. Experimental animation and avant-garde film provide the historical sources for contemporary motion graphics, both in terms of morphology and as structural guides for the synchronisation of sound and image.
