January 25, 2023
We were approached with a rare, one-of-a-kind project: showcase and celebrate the Nebraska State Capitol with a video that highlights its breathtaking artwork. As a centerpiece to the video, we were tasked with bringing “The Genius of Creativity”—a stone mosaic on the Capitol floor—to life. The video started with the idea of exploring the story of Nebraska. Not just the story of humankind and civilization, but the story of the cosmos—of the prehistoric energy and matter that developed and grew and moved through space to create the world, its people and our state.
We liked the idea of digging deep into Nebraska’s past, bone-deep, down into the soil, to show how we, as a people, came to be. As we explored our history, the project took on a mythical, magical kind of quality. An artistic interpretation of gazing into space and attempting to comprehend how life began. We positioned the “Genius of Creativity” as the driving force behind all things, a guide through time that shows us how our earliest imaginings have evolved into the incredible people and places we see today.
To tell the story, we captured extensive drone footage of each piece of artwork, smoothing out imperfections, capturing symmetrical, head-on angles of hard-to-reach mosaics, murals and paintings, painstakingly editing stonework and chandeliers out of the imagery so we had perfect views of the ceilings, the floors and the walls of the Capitol. Then we cut each work of art into individual pieces, putting them back together in new shapes, making them move to tell our story. We wanted to capture the essence of something bigger than ourselves—something rooted in prehistory that has kept us going for millennia and will guide us forward into the future.
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