The Brief
A new museum needs a film. The brief said "celebration." Most brands hear that and reach for the montage.
NMAAM was a new Nashville museum dedicated to the African American influence on American music. The launch needed a hero film. The reflex was stock footage and a wall of names. We pushed back. Stock footage is the visual language of corporate apologies; it doesn’t honor the music it claims to celebrate.
The Insight
You can’t celebrate the soundtrack of a century with a stock-photo montage.
A century of American music, written mostly by Black artists, mostly without enough credit. You can’t make a montage that earns the right to celebrate that. You have to do the work — every frame, every character, every choice of who to feature and how. The craft IS the celebration.
The Work
Sixty seconds. Every frame drawn. Twenty-plus artists honored.
Production partner: Elastic. Format: 60-second hand-drawn animation. Research phase: weeks deep into the lineage from delta blues to modern hip-hop, mapping who shaped what, when, and how the threads connect. Character studies for each artist featured, drawn in a style that respected the era and the person — Robert Johnson rendered differently from Rihanna, but treated with equal craft. Every frame was deliberate because the celebration depended on it being deliberate.
The hand-drawn approach was the point. Honoring this much music, this many lives, doesn’t happen on a moodboard.
The Results
Animation Format
Artists Featured
Sixty seconds of hand-drawn animation in partnership with Elastic. 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 20th-century artists, each rendered in a style that honored their era without flattening them into the same look. The labor was the point.
My Take
Cultural-institution work asks more of the craft than commercial work does. A bank can announce itself with a generic anthem and survive. A museum honoring the African American influence on American music can’t.
The hand-drawn approach added weeks to the timeline and cost more than the easier path would have. That was the argument: if we want to celebrate the labor of generations of artists, the film itself has to show labor. Elastic understood that on the first call.
The lesson I take from this one: there are briefs where the shortcut is the betrayal. NMAAM was one of those. The clients knew it before we did.