Penn State University

Penn State University Brand Film

Context

Team up with Decoded Advertising to create a brand film for Penn State University that boldly communicates its academic, community, research, and athletic initiatives to PSU alumni and students.

Strategy

Leverage the emotion and scale of the University’s mission by integrating impactful typography into footage that captures the innovative spirit of its vibrant community.

Solution

The film helped establish a unique set of design frameworks for PSU, giving the university a dynamic, differentiated, and ownable visual style across its communication channels.

Designing for Emotion

PSU’s brand film is an energetic manifesto that uses inventive type design and dynamic editing to illustrate its active mission.

Our creatives collaborated with the Decoded and PSU teams to craft a 90-second film that communicates the “power of we” in everything Penn State does — from academic innovations to ground-breaking research, to cultivating one of the nation’s largest alumni-led philanthropic communities. In the process, we developed a powerful motion theory and visual style of expressive type and animation techniques to help the institution continue to stand out.

Collaborative Editing

Editing and animating in tandem helped us sustain the magic of the original film concept throughout its creative evolution.

Utilizing a wealth of footage captured by the agency and university’s internal teams, we created a dynamic edit designed to build energy, emotion, and excitement while emphasizing underlying core brand attributes. This was achieved through a collaborative and agile creative process that moved fluidly between our editors, designers, and animators, giving us our clients the control and adaptability necessary to craft an engaging narrative with maximum impact.