Imaginary Forces

Imagine going on a cross country trip with your best friends. Then imagine that it’s in the beginning of the wild 60’s, and that you have an almost unlimited supply of LSD. That’s what Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters did, and they caught it all on camera.

Decades later, filmmakers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood turned this archival footage into a documentary and asked us to design the visual language of the film.

We created several key sequences, including the main titles, and a sequence where an authentic audio recording of Kesey describing his experience while participating in a government drug trial serves as the narrative. Based on his very trippy transcript, we shot and animated his first acid trip. This combination of psychedelic visuals and paint-on-film techniques defines the look of the entire film.