Reunion
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EJI | The Northern Cities

We partnered with The Equal Justice Initiative to create a film series about the history of slavery and racial injustice in America, featured in the inaugural exhibition of the recently launched Legacy Museum. Working with a global team of artists, producers, activists, and legal advocates, we created six films, each with a different focus and approach to design and animation.

“The Northern Cities” is a self contained series of three short films created for this project, all of which can be viewed in their entirety at The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

Below is a short edit featuring some selected scenes from the series.

New York. Boston. Charleston.

“The Northern Cities” is a series of three films, each focusing on a different northern city in the US and the ways in which that city supported the facilitation of slavery in America.

Many believe the falsehood that the southern states were the only ones to profit off of the enslavement of Black people. But in reality, the individuals, industries, and communities that benefited from slavery were vast.

Drawing with scissors.

Drawing with scissors.

The films in the “Northern Cities” series all share the same art direction which relies on bold shapes, gestural lines, tactile grain and a high contrast palette. It’s a style that has been developed for the goal of clearly communicating a lot with a little.

Simple forms allow us to quickly move through dense information without losing our audience. And by embracing an aesthetic that leans heavily into graphic design, we’re granted the flexibility to cover a wide range of content while still adhering to a consistent style. People, objects, maps, data, and typography all feel at home here, interacting in dynamic and unexpected ways.