BLACK RAVE CULTURE

Concept & Visual Language

For Carhartt WIP Radio's Label Feature "Black Rave Culture," I translated the raw, unfiltered energy of the D.C. collective into an analog visual language. Black Rave Culture see their music as a statement, a reclaiming of the Black origins of dance music, born out of DIY sessions and a scene that resists any polished surface. I carried that attitude into a VHS glow concept for the motion piece: layered compositing in After Effects builds up grain, chromatic shift, subtle displacement shifting across the frame, and a warm, slightly decaying glow reminiscent of analog tapes from early rave archives. The look reads as old and worn at first glance, yet it never fully settles into nostalgia. Details like the frame rate keep it hovering right at the edge of something more contemporary, a tension between decay and modernity that mirrors the collective's own position: honoring a lineage while pushing it forward. The blur and decay in the image are a deliberate nod to the rawness and imperfection the trio keep returning to in the interview.

Client

Art Director

Year

Carhartt WIP & Black Rave Culture

Sarah Schweizer

2026

Execution & Rollout

The rotating label logo was built entirely in Blender 3D: starting from the Carhartt WIP logo, I extruded the geometry and then reworked it by hand in Sculpt Mode to give it an organic, slightly worn character in line with the feature's raw, handmade aesthetic. The surface material was also fully generated in Blender, shading and texture layering included, giving the object physical depth and presence before it was composited with the VHS layers from After Effects. The finished animation then ran for one month worldwide at point of sale across all Carhartt WIP stores, bridging the collective's music with the brand's physical retail space. Alongside social media formats such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, the accompanying mix was posted on Soundcloud. For stores without screens, the campaign was adapted into printed posters, occasionally paired with print ads built around content drawn directly from the interview.