Adam & the Labelmaker
Adam & the Labelmaker was a large-scale film project I had planned for my undergraduate years at Millikin University. The original script was a crime drama/comedy following Adam Parker, a young and naive rap artist seeking fame and fortune. As he desperately worked to make a name for himself, he would find himself in over his head with a ruthless record label executive and a city-wide drug trafficking ring. The script was unfortunately abandoned due to its unattainable location and prop requirements for a student film, and I shifted my focus to more promising large-scale artistic projects. Still, there are many interesting relics from this early passion project, perhaps the most interesting of which is the film’s animated intro sequence.
This animation served as a sort of virtual elevator pitch for the film. Since recruiting talent and filming demo scenes was implausible in the short term, I used my skills in Adobe After Effects to capture the essence of the film in a stylized audiovisual experience. I don’t think Adam & the Labelmaker needed an animated intro sequence, but this project helped bring a small part of my vision to life as I was gearing up to pitch the project to Millikin’s student-run film company.
Hand-drawn sketches from my notebook outlining my animation’s progression.
The Process:
I had three goals for my animation: compelling worldbuilding, unique typeface integration, and seamless motion. With that in mind, I drafted ideas until I had a solid vision of the path forward. The story of this brief sequence mirrors the story of the full script, opening with petty drug crime that develops into tense altercations with the law, and ending with a violent gunfight. In the closing moments, we’re brought back to an image of the music industry that set the entire story in motion. I had to carefully prepare myself for the challenges ahead, with the numerous seamless transitions and transformations requiring an intimate knowledge of the software’s tools. With a strategy in mind, I began my work in After Effects.
The animation is broken apart into four distinct scenes that I animated in chronological order. Once one scene was done, I placed it into the timeline and carefully laid out the start of the next scene, ensuring that the transition would be seamless before moving forward. To aid in these transitions, I implemented a virtual camera that would smoothly move through the scene and zoom in or out on specific locations when needed. I illustrated every element seen in the animation using After Effects’ pen tool. Simple shapes were drawn freehand, and more complex objects were traced from reference photos that I took or from royalty-free stock images. Every step of animating this sequence felt like juggling one hundred different ideas and elements at once. It took non-stop vigilance and attention to detail to make every movement line up and feel satisfying, and the results are quite impressive.
After completing the visual half of the project, I moved to Ableton Live to produce an original score. In line with the script’s themes, I drew my inspiration from various subgenres of rap music, leaning heavily on old-school synthesizer sounds and programmed drum grooves. Hip-hop is the backbone of this story, and it’s used as a character study of the story’s lead. Adam Parker is not a groundbreaking rapper or producer. He’s convinced that he’ll make it to fame with the right opportunities, but his discography is amateurish and derivative. That naive ambition both gives Adam his charm and propels him head-first into mortal danger. I wanted this intro sequence to sound like Adam’s music. The beat is simple and somewhat abrasive in its lack of subtlety. Still, it has a fun, energetic bounce to it as it progresses. It’s far from my favorite score I’ve composed—part of me wishes I dropped the amateur hip-hop producer act and made something more nuanced—but I think it meets the demands of the narrative it accompanies. While the score fills up most of the audio mix, I added some simple sound design to make the scene’s visual interactions feel more tactile. Roaring car engines and booming gunshots were necessities to immerse the audience in the moment. Yet on the quieter side, brief gusts of wind during quick motions and gently crinkling paper as the record slides into its sleeve create a deeper sense of presence. Some sounds, like the burning of a cigarette or the quiet thud of a dropping plastic bag, are nearly imperceptible in the final composition, but every small detail comes together to make an animation that is alive with exciting motion and sound.
Conclusion:
Adam & the Labelmaker was an inseparable part of me for nearly three years in college, and it’s a shame that the full cinematic experience turned out to be an ambition too great for me at the time. I still love reflecting on the work that I put into this entire world. The animation, of course, is a fantastic accomplishment even separated from the original material, but the many other since-archived assets I developed to tell my story all have a warm place in my heart as well. I’m not sure if this specific project will ever fully come to life. My original script had plenty of holes that I could never convincingly fill, and the original challenges with money and resources haven’t gotten any easier either. But someday I hope to take the parts of this story that compelled me for so many years and work them into a future project that can capture its spirit.
