Case Study - History Deep Dives

As Lead Animator and Video Editor at CuriosityStream, you occasionally have some down time between projects. I often used these rare opportunities to catch up on the current technology and trends in my field, but every once and awhile I just wanted to create something. The idea to make History Deep Dives came from my love of Uncle John's Bathroom reader. A series of books that contains short snippets of trivia and history lessons perfect for a trip to the bathroom. Of course I didn't mention the source of my inspiration to the Producers I pitched this idea to. They liked it and asked me to create a handful of these animated shorts.

Henry "Box" Brown

In my research for the first five topics, I came across the story of Henry "Box" Brown. His story was so fantastic that one of the Producers said, "Hold on Nick, these have to be true stories, or we can't use them." The story of a slave who mailed himself in a crate to Philadelphia and became famous and most of us have never heard his name.

In-between jobs, over the course of the next month I wrote up a script, built the elements, textures, lighting, recorded the voice over, selected the music, mixed the audio, animated the various scenes, composited and cut the final into a one minute piece that the Producers loved. So much so that they wanted to involve the marketing department into the meeting and see how we could leverage these into social media posts to promote our other shows. Unfortunately, once more people got involved the project slowed and slowed and slowed till no one had the time to wrap them all up. Now CuriosityStream's History Deep Dives has become just another piece of forgotten history trivia fit for Uncle John's Reader.