How Motion Design Brought Our Bon Jovi Film to Life
A Q&A with creative director Kennon Fleisher
In our newest series, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, viewers will see hundreds of photos and videos from the band’s personal archive, artifacts that have never been seen before now. They help add intimacy and depth to the film—and they’re just plain cool.
But making a documentary is not as simple as just scanning a photo and putting it into the film. Visual artists add depth and animations to bring the images to life. It’s a part of the artform of documentary filmmaking that doesn’t gets enough attention, and so I thought it would be fun to speak with Kennon Fleisher, the founder of the creative motion design studio Kinesis.
Kennon and his team’s work is littered everywhere in many of our projects. Most recently, they brought Thank You, Goodnight to life, and today, he’ll walk you through the process of how the project came together and was shaped by their creative approach. Kennon is incredibly talented, and one of our favorite collaborators. Oh, and don’t worry: his fingerprints are all over some of our upcoming projects too. So stay tuned.
I hope you enjoy the conversation.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
ROS: Can you break down this project by the numbers? What was the timeline and workflow like?
KF: All in all, it was a 16-month project, and we had a small team on it. I put a lot of my own time into it, but we had six other artists helping as well. In total, we created over 504 deliverables that ranged from treatments of archival footage to maps to bespoke 3D animations. After we finished, we were able to go back and see how much of the series is covered by graphics, and it's 73 minutes in total. So, we touched a pretty significant portion of the series and tried to make sure that each one of those moments helps to shape the narrative in some way. That amount of work is a testament to how we felt about the project. We know that Jon himself and the rest of Bon Jovi, they put in the time and the effort to really stand out.
Religion of Sports: This project features thousands of archival videos and photos, many of which had never been seen before. But the archival itself isn’t enough to make a great documentary. How did your team help bring these pieces to life in a way that ultimately became another tool for telling this story?
Kennon Fleisher: When my team first started working on this project, the first thing we saw was a clip of John going into his basement and unearthing all these tapes and videos and different artifacts. I mean, he's really kept a great record of everything. So, from the very beginning, that feeling of having a peak into someone unearthing this personal history really informed our creative approach. We wanted it to feel like Jon is sharing this personal footage with you, the viewer.
And so that that really informs everything we did, down to the way we treated archival photos. We created this look that felt like Jon was showing you an old scrapbook where he had documented his career with images taped into it. Techniques like that help create a layered narrative to the whole project. Viewers listen to the music and see the story play out in the episode, but with the design, we were able to give it that extra element of a bespoke and unique touch to it. It became even more immersive.
It's not just photos. Another thing we did is when we wanted to highlight some of Jon’s lyrics, the handwriting you see on screen, that’s Jon’s actual handwriting. How often do you get to see that stuff? It’s a small thing but it just helps connect the viewer to Jon and the story in a really unique and tangible way.
ROS: Is there anything visually that sets Thank You, Goodnight apart from other documentaries that you have worked on?
KF: This isn't a knock at any other docs, but we tried to make every single graphic have some sort of a bespoke touch to it. So, we were focused on giving everything different textures, or creating different camera moves, or just trying to keep the narrative flowing in different ways. One way we do that in a way that feels seamless is that we always try to watch things in context. We don't try to just deliver things that are prepackaged or templated; we try to give everything its own flow and narrative pacing.
We really love mining into the authenticity of things, so we actually went and found things like a ticket from Bon Jovi's Giants Stadium concert on eBay. We then we scanned that ticket into our system, and we weren’t just able to use the ticket itself. We could duplicate the actual paper texture of a 1980s ticket stub, the typography, the printing style.
We did a lot of that stuff so that everything we made could feel real and not just like stuff that was designed on a computer in 2024. And so, that's one of the things that I think can really make a difference in the storytelling, the narrative, and the visual aesthetic of it all.
ROS: Were there any specific techniques or tools that you have utilized in this project that you've never done before?
KF: Because of tight schedules, we used a software called Unreal Engine so that we could use some 3D animations throughout the series. Traditionally, if you want to create 3D animations, the process to render those images—for your computer to generate the final product, frame-by-frame—can take hours for a large process. If you want to change anything, it takes a lot of time.
Unreal Engine is actually a platform used by video game developers. It’s where they built Fortnite. And instead of waiting for animations to render, you create something 3D, and it all happens in real time like in a video game.
So for this project, it made it easy to get quick reactions, gut checks from the team, where people could take a look and tell us yes or no to that stuff. And those tools really significantly reduced the workflow that a traditional 3D pipeline takes.
ROS: What was the most rewarding aspect or experience of working on Thank You, Goodnight?
KF: Just the fact that we got to work on something for somebody so iconic. That alone is just an honor, right? It's humbling in a way, too, because there's so many days where you step out and you go, like, “How did I get the opportunity to work on something like this?” It's just really cool. And that motivates us to just keep pushing and doing better every time we approach a project like this.
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