National Archives Exhibit & Illustrations

National Archives, keeper of our country’s records for almost 100 years, wanted to take a key story of the Civil War, the voyage of the CSS Alabama, and make it appeal to tweens.

Timbuktoons was contacted to develop comic book styled illustrations and teaser video for the interactive exhibit: “Discovering the Civil War.”

The illustrations all correlated to specific archived documents chronicling the journey of the Confederate “pirate” ship from construction to its final battle.

The illustrations were so well received that Archives commissioned two follow-up projects to be produced and sold along with their traveling exhibit: a 16-page comic book and accompanying motion graphic novel on DVD.

 

We produced illustrations for an interactive display, a comic book, and motion comic for the Discovering the Civil War exhibit.

Challenge

  • Use relevant style and media formats to connect history to a middle-school target age
  • Write in script form the story of a key Civil War battle from numerous historical documents
  • Balancing historical accuracy with creative storytelling

Solution

  • 15 action comic styled panels for an interactive display
  • animated teaser for the CSS Alabama exhibit featured on the Washington Post website
  • a 16-page comic book with accompanying motion comic on DVD

Services: illustrations, character design, animatics, motion graphics, print design

Software: Sketchbook Pro, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects

Todd Hampson and the gang at Timbuktoons are awesome! Very professional, and very creative! We keep coming back again and again!

Phil Vischer | Creator of What’s In the Bible and VeggieTales

Let’s animate something
amazing together.

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