Telling 160 Years of History, One Photo at a Time.
To celebrate First Horizon Bank’s 160-year legacy, we were asked by Mindgruve, San Diego to create a piece that felt warm, human, and timeless — something that could honor the past while still feeling relevant and fresh. The result is a :30 motion piece that unfolds like a living photo album: a heartfelt mosaic of real stories, real faces, and real connection.
Design & Animation Approach.
We leaned into tactile transitions and soft, analog-inspired animation — slow zooms, crossfades, and motion layers that evoked memory, not motion graphics. Each moment flowed into the next like flipping through a beloved family album. Rather than hitting people over the head with “production,” we focused on resonance. Gentle pacing. Humanity first.
Bringing Archival Photos to Life.
A key challenge? How to create something dynamic and emotionally rich using only still images. Our solution blended craft and technology in a way that felt seamless to the viewer but groundbreaking under the hood.
We used generative AI tools to bring archival photos from the bank’s own collection to life, subtly animating figures, gestures, and glances in a way that preserved authenticity while adding breath and warmth. These AI-augmented photos were then shot on green screen to give us fully controlled, locked-off footage we could composite into our handcrafted world.
The result? Cinematic movement with emotional precision — intimate without ever feeling artificial.
Smart Design for Every Screen.
As always, we knew this piece needed to live beyond broadcast. So we built every scene with flexibility in mind, designing compositions that could reframe elegantly across a range of aspect ratios, from 16:9 for television to 1:1 and 9:16 for social.
Rather than simply cropping the master, we constructed our animation scenes within a safe and modular framework. Key subjects were centered or weighted for adaptability, and depth was layered to allow for custom re-framing without compromising the visual integrity.
In the closing seconds, the camera pulls back to show that every image we’ve seen — and many more we haven’t — are part of a single mosaic. That mosaic gently resolves into the First Horizon star logo: not a symbol pasted on, but a mark built from community, story, and time.