This idea came from a mistake I made as I was working on another idea I had, which gave me the trailing of letters. At the same time as I did this mistake I was working on developing the Lyrics idea. And I was looking around for music to use the lyrics from. Ohne Dich by Rammstein was playing on my computer and I put one of the lines from the song in, just to have some text to work with.
As I was working more and more with the text, I began to play with how it looked. I wanted to get the meaning of the words through, not only to German speakers, but also to those that don't. The phrase "ohne dich kann ich nicht sein" means "with out you I can not be". It is from a love song, but in true Rammstein fashion it is not the normal kind of love song. According to the rumors I have heard it was written right after the father of one of the band members died. The youtube video at the bottom is a live preformace of this song.
I played with various ways of getting the message of the words through. One of the ways was color, as you can see from the sketches, I tried to work with ice blues, I wanted a cold feeling. How ever, the baby blues I ended up with did not have the feeling I wanted, so I decided to go for the monochrome instead. Another reason for this is that I am a big B/W fan. Another thing I played around with was the drop off point. I contemplated not having it at all, but that did not work so well with the text and it's meaning. The next was where to have it. For a while I had a fixed dropp off. This worked, but not as well as I would have liked. So then I ended up with the one that is in the final picture. One thing that required a lot of experimentation was the number of times the text should be repeated. This was done with trail and error. I ended up with I also wanted some rotation on the letters as they were falling, but I was experiencing problems with getting this to work.
Click to veiw Applet and source code