Digital Media

Gunpowder & Sky Animates Music Lore for ‘Drawn & Recorded’

Published on May 3, 2016

Newly formed Los Angeles studio Gunpowder & Sky has partnered with Oscar- and Grammy-winning producer T Bone Burnett (Crazy Heart), acclaimed animator Drew Christie (New York Times “Op-Docs” series) and music television producer Bill Flanagan (Storytellers, Crossroads) to develop and produce a new animated series that tells folkloric stories from the history of music. Titled Drawn & Recorded, the series is directed by Christie and produced by Flanagan and Gunpowder & Sky’s Van Toffler. Burnett provides narration for the animations.

“Music has pretty much defined the emotional highs and lows of most of our lives,” said Toffler, CEO and co-founder of Gunpowder & Sky. “So it’s an honor to be able to shine a light in a unique unfiltered way, along with T Bone, Bill and Drew, on these buried fables covering the creation of great music, chance artist meetings, untimely deaths and freak occurrences that altered the course of modern music.”

Drawn & Recorded will illumine the lives of iconic musicians from Elvis Presley, Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson to current rock and hip-hop stars, digging deep into music history to find and relate fascinating, thought-provoking and touching stories that don’t often come to light. The shorts, produced in Christie’s distinctive style, will cover all manner of post-session anecdotes, from the hilarious to the tragic and everything in between.

“I have always been fascinated by the stories behind, underneath and around music,” said Christie. “Music is very mystical and with animation we can get into that realm to explore it without being subject to the laws of gravity or time and space. Plus, there’s no one better to mine the rich world of music history with than legendary super-producer T Bone Burnett, brilliant music writer and producer Bill Flanagan and Van Toffler, the wizard behind many of the most iconic MTV shows.”

Drawn & Recorded is currently in production. A distribution platform for the series will be announced in the next few weeks.