Parsons

In the silent spring of 2020, as students were confined to education through a screen, Parsons School of Design asked Karlssonwilker to create a vibrantly optimistic video for the school's new website. Since we couldn't shoot on campus, we were asked to create a typography-focused animation using a combination of imagery, photography, existing B-roll footage, motion graphics, animations, and typographic treatments, set to an original soundtrack that we scored. Armed with a script and the Parsons brand guidelines, we set about to highlight specific words with a playful treatment of 2D/3D elements derived from the shapes of the letterforms. These highlights also allowed us to transition between disparate clips as the shapes multiply and take over the screen. The typography for each highlighted word became the seed for a series of processing sketches that produced shapes and colors within the contours of the letterforms. Some explode quite quickly, others linger around the curves of the letters. The sound design was developed after the visuals for the animation. It was composed around small vignettes of sounds for each highlighted word, strung together with an underlying beat and culminating in a grand anthem.