National Museum of African American History & Culture:
The Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal
Captivating motion design videos promoting the launch of NMAAHC's newest multi-award-winning program,
The Freedmen's Search Portal.
This search portal was created out of a need for a crucial source of information regarding ancestral lineage, records, and more. In creating these videos, our goal was to alert researchers, historians, and everyday people, particularly Black Americans, of the portal’s new existence.
Visual Style Guide Curation, Storyboarding, & Photoshop
Corey Hemingway
Motion Design
Corey Jones
Official Site
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/initiatives/freedmens-bureau-records
Social Media Presence Mockups
Creating visual pieces for social media platforms can require a different level of creativity.
What designs can I create that would help everyday users, family historians, professional historians, genealogists, and the like, to pause and take note of these visuals, notifying them of the search portal’s release?
Still moving images communicate more quietly than animated imagery and video content, but still they speak.
I utilized some of the same imagery from the storyboards and finalized motion-designed videos, as I felt like the pops of color and antiquated images would pull users in, and the prominence of the Smithsonian Institute would do the rest.
In the end, these images weren’t used, but I still enjoyed every minute developing the visuals.
Social Media Visual Ideation
Motion Design Visual Ideation
Ideating is my favorite phase of my design process. The ideation phase is where creativity feels loose and bursting with possibilities.
This particular font, Douglass Pen, was chosen for this project to hopefully reflect history and the writing typical of its era.
Then, I went into Milanote to archive references and color swatches under a category titled, ‘Look & Feel’.
As the reference library grew and progressed, ideas also began to materialize for the storyboard I would create for NMAAHC’s two motion-designed videos, the final deliverables.
I drafted up some quick sketches to get a stronger visual of what should transpire in the motion design videos.
Leaves and plants became part of the visuals. While they pinpointed a time when trees, bushes, and nature were abundant, they also point to when the freed and enslaved were using them for medicinal purposes in the Deep South.
Corey Jones, our motion designer on the team, and I collaborated seamlessly. He animated the storyboards and visuals I had created.
The last 2 videos are final and can be seen via the National Museum of African American History and Culture website.
Brief View of references that I saved on my Milanote board