Afrochine · 2025
King of Them All
Animation production for Afrochine's King Records documentary, distributed on PBS — bringing a still archive of Cincinnati's boundary-breaking label to life through period-accurate, Billboard-inspired motion design.
The brief
King of Them All, produced by Afrochine and distributed on PBS channels, tells the story of King Records — the Cincinnati label that, from the 1940s through the 1970s, put rhythm-and-blues and country on the same roster and broke racial lines in the music business while it did. James Brown, Hank Ballard, Bull Moose Jackson, the Delmore Brothers; founder Syd Nathan and producer Henry Glover behind them.
The problem with telling that story on screen is the same one every archival documentary hits: the people are gone, the moments weren’t filmed, and a wall of still photos and chart listings can only carry a film so far. The brief was to fill those gaps — to animate the history the camera never caught, in a way that felt like it belonged to the era rather than imposed on it.
Approach
The visual identity, developed with design studio MDC, drew on the source material the period actually produced: Billboard magazine. The chart pages, the “most-played” listings, the trade-paper layout and Futura type set the system — and our job was to bring it into motion, so when the film moves into animation it reads like the archive coming alive rather than a modern overlay.
Inside that system, the cast came to life as black-and-white line-art caricatures — accentuated features, period dress, drawn to move. Syd Nathan, the artists, the deals and the rivalries got staged as character scenes: a singer and a label boss at the microphone, a scoreboard of chart positions. Archival photography and newspaper clippings sat inset alongside them, with film-burn transitions and decade title cards stitching the eras together.
The discipline was period accuracy. Every color, font, texture, and layout choice had to hold up against real 1950s source material sitting right next to it in the cut. The deliverables ran deep — approved character builds, animated scenes, chart animations, decade titles, lyric cards, and transition elements — handed off in batches as ProRes for the edit.
Outcome
The animated segments were delivered and folded into the documentary — a complete period-accurate motion toolkit that lets the film tell King Records’ story with movement where only stills existed before.
Watch King of Them All on PBS →
Team: Alex Walk (animation producer / project manager) + Backbeat. Produced by Afrochine · visual identity with design studio MDC · distributed on PBS. Illustration/animation: Zach Parker. Year: 2025
Gallery
