Class assignment leads to job offers

Friday, April 1, 2011

Conan O'Brien Kinetic Typography from Jacob Gilbreath on Vimeo.

By Amy Wilson

Graphic design senior Jacob Gilbreath posted his Digital Design Studio assignment, a kinetic typography video, to the internet the night of March 2. Four weeks and 144,000 project views later, Gilbreath is receiving internship and job offers from California to France.

“After the night it was featured on Behance.net (online artists’ net), I woke up the next morning with 109 emails, and I was like, ‘What the heck happened?’”

The Digital Design assignment required students to choose a famous speech in United States history and create a kinetic typography piece to capture the concept and tone of the speech.

Gilbreath’s professor, Justen Renyer, said he wanted a way for students to expand their graphic design skills. “The restriction of the project is that every element that appears in it has to be typography. That forces students to think creatively about how to express certain material using just type.”

Gilbreath chose to use Conan O’ Brien’s farewell speech from his last episode on NBC’s The Tonight Show. He said he wanted to depict Conan O’Brien as the monumental and solid wall that he is. The combination of eclectic typography and modern 3D letter forms achieved in Cinema 4D provides a contrast between old and new. This contrast emphasizes time to create a sturdy and timeless object. This solidity and timelessness is the perfect representation of Conan O’Brien.

He created 60 individual type layouts and close to 4,000 frames with each frame taking three to eight minutes to render. “I overclocked my computer so it would run faster, and took the side off so I could use a fan to keep it cool,” Gilbreath said.

Along with the time crunch, the challenge was narrowing down and choosing the typefaces that best portrayed his desired concept. “I had to narrow down hundreds and hundreds of choices to these really time-tested fonts that were proven to be classic and timeless because that’s the whole concept behind Conan.”

One month after starting the project, Gilbreath successfully overcame the challenges and received numerous internship and job offers. He will be an intern this summer for Prologue in Venice Beach, California, a design company he has dreamed of working with since high school.

“I’ve just been overwhelmed by the amount of attention it’s been getting, designers sending me messages on Twitter saying they love my work.”

In addition, Gibreath has been asked to do a promo video for an Exxex, England hip hop group, help with a music video project for a Japan relief single, offered freelance work with a photographer who shoots for several celebrities, his work will be featured in two magazines and he’s been contacted by eh creative director for TBS/TNT/TCM.

Renyer said he was glad the assignment offered benefits beyond the classroom. “I’m very proud of Jacob’s work. I’m glad one assignment could be so useful in furthering his career. I just want to make sure my students have good portfolio pieces for jobs.”