When mega-producer Rick Rubin was putting the finishing touches on Johnny Cash’s final album, American VI: Ain’t No Grave, he had trouble thinking up a visual to accompany the single “Ain’t No Grave”, the Man in Black’s final recording.
Music videos for posthumously-released music tend to fall into two categories: a stock footage retrospective or an animated adventure. Fortunately for Rubin, director Chris Milk happened to have an idea on the back-burner that inventively combined both archival imagery with animation in a manner befitting of Cash’s defiant-to-the-end attitude.
Along with creative technologist Aaron Koblin, Milk pitched The Johnny Cash Project, a crowdsourced web film that allows fans to create original drawings based on archival frames of the deceased country legend. Pieced together in sequence and set to “Ain’t No Grave”, the artwork becomes an ever-evolving, abstract portrait that never looks the same twice.
The website was built by @radical.media using the prodco’s own content management system (CMS) platform and runs on donated bandwidth from hosting provider Datagram. Its design balances simple instructions with a solemn, black-and-white aesthetic.
“Rick Rubin and Chris Milk wanted the site to feel more like an art gallery exhibit then a technical web site,” says @radical EP Evan Schechtman. “The art should speak the loudest and we wanted to create a reduced simplified structure for the idea.”
The project’s drawing tool, developed by Flash wiz Mr.doob, lets contributors illustrate over single frames of archival footage cut together by Final Cut’s Akiko Iwakawa. Users can undo or redo brush strokes, customize brushes and zoom in on their creations to finely-hone details.
Once complete, fans have the option of categorizing their creations as “abstract”, “sketchy”, “realistic” or “pointillism”. Viewers can then choose to watch versions of the ever-evolving video comprised of work that falls into one of those categories or the most recent frames or the highest-rated frames. So far fans have contributed more than 4,600 frames.
For Milk, a seasoned music video and commercial director who’s worked with artists such as Gnarls Barkley, Kanye West, U2 and Green Day, The Johnny Cash Project was an opportunity to move away from traditional broadcast work and think creatively for a new medium. Boards spoke with the director to find out how the project evolved.
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