The Andy Warhol Diaries

{ UPDATE: We won a Silver Cube for this project at the 101st Art Directors Club Awards! }

As soon as I heard about this documentary I knew it was going to be something special. Something that I wanted to see.

In April of 2021 Elastic Creative Director Hazel Baird approached me about my availability to help out with a concept pitch for this job, and I’m happy to say that my concept won. Well, kind of. I had written up two different conceptual approaches and written quite a bit of (possibly long winded and boring) copy explaining my ideas. I had also included a number of images in the deck to help illustrate my points.

Turns out that a photo really is worth a thousand words, because Ryan Murphy and his team liked one of the deck images so much that they asked if we could re-pitch the concept using that image as a starting point. And that’s when we developed the idea of someone in a museum gallery, reflecting on Andy’s work and life, as a bookend to the motion sequence.

From a design standpoint, we faced some big challenges. It’s ridiculously easy when working anywhere near Warhol to fall into his aesthetic sensibility, and I didn’t want to make anything that looked like Andy’s artwork. On the other hand, the only source materials we had to tell the story were his drawings, paintings, and photos, and we weren’t supposed to cut up or alter those images too much. I’m grateful to have had help from the impressively talented Erica Gorochow, who worked with me to navigate our own visual vocabulary for the sequence.

It was a blast working with Erica, and I really love the way some of our frames mirror each other and show a dialogue between designers.

Thematically, the story we wanted to tell mirrored Andy’s life. A shy man, insecure about his own looks and sexuality, who struggled to find meaningful love amidst the chaos of his life. But we also wanted to include Queer, erotic imagery to reveal that Andy was not asexual, as he routinely claimed in interviews.

We also had the directive to feature images of Jed Johnson, John Gould and Jean-Michel Basquiat — the three men whose relationships to Andy are central to the documentary. Ryan Murphy and his team had also requested that we limit the color palette to red, pink, black, and white, which we did, mostly.

Another theme that permeates the documentary is the specter of death. Andy had a fascination with the subject, made only stronger after he was shot and nearly killed by would-be assassin Valerie Solanis in 1968. And of course the presence of AIDS in the mid-80s made it impossible for anyone in the gay community to ignore the subject. We made sure to reference this theme a number of ways in the sequence, using Andy’s ‘Death and Disaster’ paintings (electric chair, car crash, JFK assassination, atomic bomb blast, etc) in particular to highlight the troubled, even tragic nature of his relationships at times.

CREDITS

Studio: Elastic.tv
Creative Director: Hazel Baird
Art Director: Nol Honig
Design: Erica Gorochow
Animation: Nol Honig
Producer: Mitchell Fraser
Editor: Rachel Fowler
Color Management: Andrew Young