top of page
Shangri-La studios approached me to design and animate Jay Z's discography for an upcoming documentary. The project consists of 12 episodes, each structured around Rick Rubin and Jay Z listening to a few of his tracks, and chatting about their origin. It was an honor to contribute to this project. From a production standpoint, it posed a unique challenge: the team wanted to begin editing in 2 weeks.
We agreed a simple approach would be best, something legible but taseful. Here is the treatment I designed:
1. Text animation
2. Always centered, horizontally and vertically
3. Chorus is italicized
Once the design treatment was approved, I integrated it into an After Effects template. There are 12 Episodes in the series, an average of 5 songs per episode, and 500 lyrics per song. This process should have taken at least a month, but with my application of the available Ai in 2023, some scripting, and beefing up my PC a bit, we finished in a little over a week.
Each marker is a spike in the audio representing a word.
Making it easy to hotkey between lyrics, these import automatically into Premiere as well for the editors.
Some samples from Episode 8:
Legacy
00:00 / 02:56
No Church in the Wild
00:00 / 04:25
The Story of oJ
00:00 / 03:34
bottom of page