This was an interesting project for the JFK Library’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s “Moonshot” speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962. I was involved with several elements of the project deliverables.

On the website, I animated several audio “visualizers.” These were different styles of bars or shapes in motion. To get them to look like they were responding to sound and not just animated elements, I rendered video of parts of the speech with a responsive visualizer in After Effects. Once I had several of these references, I created 2-3 second animated SVG files by going frame by frame and adjusting the motion one frequency band at a time. It was a painstaking and time-consuming process but the results were as accurate as possible and it provided some interesting visual elements to the site.

To bring awareness to the campaign, I was also involved with developing filters for TikTok that could be used by anyone on the app. These were made with textures created in After Effects as well as real-time video manipulation tools available within the app and some scripting for sound. 

Once the project was completed, I created and captured elements to use in the case study presentation. 

To highlight the custom song by Safari Riot, I took a still shot of JFK at a speech and added some effects to it along with some motion to accent but not overpower the aesthetic. This was built using native plugins along with Trapcode Soundkeys. 

I was also asked to take photos of the out-of-home digital signage created to promote the campaign. The goal was to capture the signs with dramatic golden-hour lighting. I scouted the locations on foot and used an AR sun-tracking app to plan my shots. The weather cooperated and I got some beautiful images at sunrise in Kenmore Square and sunset on Boylston Street.