To promote its 2005 Hip Hop Honors awards special, VH-1 commissioned Brand New School to produce seven spots featuring some of the genre’s most influential artists and evoking their contributions to world culture.
Conceived by VH-1 writer/producer Dicken Schrader, the spots also feature contemporary rapper Nas who presents larger-than-life portraits of the artists honored on this year’s show created by renowned New York-based artist Kehinde Wiley. (The hip hop artists include Notorious B.I.G., Ice T, Salt ‘n’ Pepa and others.) In each spot, Nas appears in a stylized environment representing a different world capital and uses an ornate staff to send a golden vein coursing around the portraits and through the environments in a symbolic reference to hip hop’s global reach.
Brand New School directed Nas and created the CG environments that surround him. “The aesthetic was inspired by the Kehinde Wiley paintings which are the modern day equivalent of Renaissance portraiture; they have that same sense of grandeur,” said Brand New School designer Sean Dougherty. “To represent the various world capitals, we selected familiar landmarks—the Sphinx for Cairo, Big Ben and a double-decker bus for London—and gave them a similarly outsized scale. The result is a space in which Nas, the golden vine, the portraits and the landmarks could be highlighted in equal scale and reverence.”
BNS directed Nas on a special effects stage and created the vine and environments in 3D using Maya. Discreet’s Flame was used for compositing.
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