ARTCENTER ONLINE: TYPOGRAPHY COURSE - CONCEPT TRAILER

Software Used: Cinema 4D, Unreal Engine 5, After Effects, Premiere Pro

In early 2023, ArtCenter Online and ArtCenter’s Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography had planned on creating multiple online courses about various aspects of typography. The first course planned was Accessibility in Typography, with a tentative start date for the first classes being Summer 2023. In the lead up to this course, I was tasked with making a short concept trailer utilizing typography.

Having taken ArtCenter Extension’s course, Essentials of Typography, I was familiar with the different families of typefaces and the anatomy of characters. In my trailer, I wanted to give prospective students a taste of the kinds of things they would learn in an introductory course, while also giving an idea of how deep one could possibly go into typography.

I animated the video in Cinema 4D and wanted to render with Redshift, but I quickly realized rendering with the technology available at ArtCenter at the time would take a prohibitively long time.

Since the animations are linear keyframes with no deformers, I made the decision to export it to Unreal to render it. This allowed for much more flexibility with the camera movement, and actually resulted in me rendering more footage to edit with.

Compositing the Unreal sequences in After Effects was a little trickier because Unreal doesn’t have native compatibility like Cinema 4D, and it’s ability to create composition passes was not as intuitive as other software at the time, but the simplicity of the animations allowed me to keep all the effects I originally wanted with the video.