ANIMATOR / EDITOR / STORYBOARD DEVELOPER

This is a promotional video for Gibson Guitars to announce the Jim James Signature Guitar. This is one of the more ambitious projects I’ve taken on with my friend and amazing illustrator Jess Rotter—and our hard work paid off because won a Telly award for it!

Gibson came to us with a short brief of the major overview of the story (Jim walks through forest, finds guitar in some mystical way, and then transitions to live footage of him playing it). It was up to me to develop the shot list of how to tell the story in a compelling way and how to include certain imagery they wanted (a wooden rainbow, the MMJ owl, a guitar somehow “coming out of a tree”). So I created nearly indecipherable scribbles to try to convey the shot list, the framing, and angles. Jess then took those pathetic “drawings” and developed this extraordinary look, with mythical beasts, and trippy colors.

The only section she didn’t develop visually was the trippy light show that comes in near the end. We both wanted a throwback psychedelic sequence, and so I had to develop many renditions and and variations on what was finally settled on here. This was really approaching a problem from a truly oblique angle, as the goal was to show the specific details of the guitar. Interestingly, converting the guitar to a 70s laser light show felt like it minimized distracting details (the fact that it’s illustrated, the “cartoon version” of the wood grain, etc.) and helped pull into focus the specifics of the unique design of the guitars features.