Typography Part Two

As the third week of Nick's Typography workshop dawned. I worried about whether it would be the same as the last workshop: draw the same thing but bigger. I figured it wouldn't be, as it's a bit of a cop-out and would be quite frankly a bit disappointing. I hoped I was just being pessimistic. I was wrong.
After another four hours of my life were dropped down the drain, I left the studio with another set of paper cutouts of letters, even larger than the last. It was probably the least I'd ever produced from a workshop (until three weeks time). And then the rain came and they were utterly destroyed. I wasn't happy.

After a while, when I was producing my CV and was looking for work to include, I stumbled across the I Am Too Tall typography, and decided it might look nice in the portfolio, so I coloured them up. I decided against including them later, but they do look good coloured.

This also reminded me that I would need something else to go with that project, seeing as my last batch of cutouts were ruined. At the time, I was doing a lot of Cinema 4D work, so I thought that I could try making them on that. I started by cutting off the shadows from the original art, then filled everything with black, then inverted it. This formed the template for the vectorizer tool.

 Putting the letters together was trickier that I expected, as the original art had half of each letter cut off. All those extra details were constructed by slicing, flipping, and hacking apart the originals on Photoshop. I originally tried to do this on C4D but it turned into a nightmare.

Finally I used each letter with the vectorizer tool, then extruded them as physical objects. I then created a basic setup with a large plane for the floor and a sky box with a sun, which I tweaked to find the right lighting setup for me. I then set up a camera that would slide along the floor whilst keeping the top of each letter out of sight. Afterwards I used some nice preset textures which I edited a little before rendering it. I really like the final animation. It might not be physical but I find it tied off the project better than the original cutouts and it's pobably the definite version of the concept.

Shadowplay Typography from Jonny Clementson on Vimeo.