Kennedy Center

Overview

The Kennedy Center needed motion and video work for the opening night of performances of the Iberian Suite: global arts remix festival. I leveraged an existing logo and brand material to create a logo animation to introduce the event. This was used across a variety of collateral and incorporated into introductory motion graphics played as guests found their seats prior to the performances.

The second part of this project was a set of videos. I was given audio recordings of several prominent Iberian poets reciting their work and asked to create visual packages featuring the poetry that could be deployed during the performances. The resulting videos were played as "punctuation marks" during the opening night performance and interspersed with live dance, music, and other performing arts.

‍

Logo Animation

The logo itself implied three dimensions through it's curved arrangement of pathways made up of dots and arrows - so as a formal concern I wanted to push that forward in the logo animation. The festival (and static logo) thematically presented ideas of cultural connection, exchange, and worldliness; it was natural to find choices with the motion that would enhance this. The globe shape growing larger worked with directional movement in the dotted pathways to bring forward the ideas of cultural growth, movement and, exchange that were central to the festival. I animated the curved text around the perimeter of the globe to visually echo the shape of the central logo element while again reinforcing the ideas of movement and travel.

I was presented with several technical challenges. In order to animate this logo, I had to rebuild it from the ground up using the files given by the client as the foundation. Because the dotted pathways of the original logo as it was designed didn't actually travel in correct three dimensional pathways around a sphere, I decided to work in two-dimensions rather than construct the animation using any 3D modeling tools.

The resulting animation is constructed with an arrangement of dotted pathway assets designed as various circular and oval shapes that could be animated in such a way that would give the sense of three dimensional volume. By using curves that were drawn with this end result in mind, I was able to create a three-dimensional appearance with a two-dimensional workflow. This allowed me to deliver the work on time and preserve the final appearance of the static logo.

‍

Poetry Visuals

I paired "boutique" stock film footage with some custom shot clips to create visuals that illustrated the themes of the poetry. My approach was to create fully-baked vignettes that used sound, images, and pacing to create an overall mood while buttressing the power of the poetry. Taking these as a whole experience and not simply image set to text brought a more powerful end result.