NMAAM committed to craft as the celebration. With sixty seconds of hand-drawn animation that honored a century of Black music, frame by frame.
The launch film · a hand-drawn :60, made with Elastic.
A new Nashville museum, dedicated to celebrating and preserving the influence African Americans have had on the American soundtrack, needed a launch film.
The reflex on “celebration” briefs is a stock-footage montage and a wall of names. This one got sixty seconds of hand-drawn animation instead.
The reflex
Stock footage talks at the audience. Hand-drawn animation talks from the artists.
In advertising there never seems to be enough time to sharpen a pencil, let alone hand-draw every frame of a sixty-second animation. This project was the exception: a unique opportunity to drive the timeline and lead the visual approach.
The research
From Robert Johnson to Rihanna. Decades in motion.
Weeks of research before the first frame: who to feature, what era they shaped, how the lineage threads from delta blues to modern hip-hop.
Character studies of twenty-plus twentieth-century artists, each rendered in a style that honored their era without flattening them into the same look.
The labor
The craft is the celebration.
The hand-drawn approach added weeks to the timeline and cost more than the easier path. That was the argument: celebrating the labor of generations of artists meant the film itself had to show labor. Elastic understood that on the first call.
The launch
A launch film for a museum that didn’t take any shortcuts.
The finished animation is the culmination of a total team effort over several months, made to spread the word of the new museum and give back to an organization preserving the music’s history.
:60every frame drawn by hand
20+ artists honored · with Elastic · no stock anywhere
