Pearl Jam @ The Apollo

 
 

PEARL JAM @ THE APOLLO

Role: Ideation, Art Direction, Design, Animation, Storyboarding, Illustration
Art Direction: Sadé Robinson
Copywriter & Editor: Reagan Ward, Leslie Nelson
Motion Graphics: DJ Summitt, Sadé Robinson
Creative Direction: Anthony Spera, Salvatore Garguilo
Production: Sandra Gallagher, Belle Yau, David Soto, Emily Chan, Julie Richards

Pearl Jam announced their new album, Gigaton, would be releasing in March 2020 and wanted to do an exclusive show at the world famous Apollo Theatre for their subscribers of SiriusXM’s Pearl Jam Radio channel. Being on a tight turnaround, I took a look the new album art, the band’s website (particularly their mission statement) and their previous concerts’ key art throughout the years. I assessed that they really enjoyed illustrations of all kinds to represent them and each tour location had it’s own unique illustration. Thinking about the symbol they were using for their philanthropic work, I started sketching up concepts that could use the symbol but also make it a play on a heart. The idea was to highlight human connection. The lines coming from the “heart” served as these connections. The band and their team loved this interpretation and decided to move forward with this key art.

 
 

Due to the pandemic the show was postponed and so a lot of the assets were iced until Q3 of 2022 where the band announced the show would go on. The socials changed a bit from the stop motion-esque animation that I did to a more grunge approach for social.

There were a total of three different social videos and I worked on the story boards fro all three. Below is one of the videos final result and on the side of that the storyboards for another social video.

 
 

For print, two of my favorite pieces was the t-shirts as well as the mirror wall that spans the entire gallery and lobby once you enter the building. The wall was particularly special because the initial design was just the key art in a wide format repeated three times. This felt so uninspiring and so then we thought about how much music Pearl Jam has given us throughout the decades and how it would be important to visually tell their story. I start creating complementary elements of design like a large brush red brush stoke and building a layout for the timeline on the brush stroke. Here are the results.

 
 
 

After a global pandemic and a show that was postponed, I wasn’t sure I’d see my work come to life.
But on September 10th, 2022, I got to see it all come together and the buildup to the event on social was so special to witness.

Here is a bit of captured moments of the show!