When the team members of Datagram were faced with the opportunity to not only support the explosion of user-generated content, but also a creative artistic venture, they jumped at the chance:
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, a global transmedia company that creates some of the world’s most innovative content across all forms of media. Datagram donated the bandwidth, a decision made by company principals immediately upon learning of the project.
“When Evan Shectman, CTO of @radical.media, approached me with the idea for this site, I knew this would be something groundbreaking and that we wanted to be a part of it,” states Datagram’s VP of Sales Mike Dietze. “User-generated content is what the web is about, and letting users build their own video frames makes this one of the best music videos I’ve ever seen.”
