The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2021
The Academic animates 'Not Your Summer' live inside Google Slides for fans
The Academic turned Google Slides into an animation canvas: eleven animators drew a music video frame by frame in real time while fans roamed the document.
The Academic · BBDO New York
What it had to solve
Irish indie band The Academic had their European tour cancelled and still wanted a real-time way to reach fans for the single 'Not Your Summer'. BBDO New York pitched Google Slides as the venue, betting on its almost-instant syncing of every change to everyone in the document.
How it works
The Academic, an Irish indie band, had their European tour cancelled and wanted to reach fans for their single 'Not Your Summer'. Their agency BBDO New York saw an unlikely venue in Google Slides, where every edit appears to everyone in the document almost instantly.
That instant sync was the animation engine. In the live event on 15 July 2021, animators including four band members typed text, drew shapes, added and deleted pages and images, and dropped in GIFs frame by frame in time with the music, building a low-frame-rate animated story in front of an audience that could wander through the same document.
The performance ran three times that day, with roughly thirty minutes per show and the song streamed live each time. The work was described in trade press as the world's first live animation music video via Google Slides, and edited highlights later became the song's official music video.
Why it lands
- Google Slides' real-time multiplayer sync is itself the animation technology, so no video tooling was needed and the audience could share the workspace.
- Letting fans move through the document made them participants at a live event rather than viewers of a stream.
- The song's story of wanting to get away from yourself became a chase across pages, so the mechanics and the lyrics told the same tale.
- The approach followed the band's earlier 'Live Looper' collaboration with BBDO, proving a relationship that was ready to try a new live format.
What it did
Trade press called it the world's first live animation music video via Google Slides: the document's real-time sync became a low-frame-rate animation medium, and the making itself was the performance. Edited highlights of the livestream were later released as the official music video for the single.
What you can take
When a live tour is impossible, perform the making instead: letting an audience watch something created in real time can feel more alive than a finished video.
Since then
The event took place on 15 July 2021 with three shows, produced with Capitol Records and animation studio Open the Portal, whose teams worked remotely across New York, California, Oregon, Canada, England and Ireland. BBDO and The Academic had previously collaborated on 'Live Looper' in 2017, and D&AD archives the Slides experience under Experiential: Activation and Participation; the page records the mechanism rather than audience numbers.
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