RADIOHEART opening titles and motion identity

Kevin Cole has been a DJ for 50 years. He started out spinning disco at First Avenue in Minneapolis, helped launch Amazon’s first music store, and spent the last 25 years on the air at KEXP in Seattle. RADIOHEART: The Drive and Times of DJ Kevin Cole is a feature documentary about that whole run, by Peter Hilgendorf, co-directed and edited by Andrew Franks.

I was the film’s Design & Animation Director. I designed and animated the opening titles and the motion identity, built the graphics templates used throughout the edit, and directed an animated sequence about Kevin’s early interactions with Prince.

Developing the look

Peter came to me with the film’s main themes and a hunch that simple shapes could carry them: squares for First Avenue’s black and white tile floor and record sleeves, circles for records, KEXP’s round studio lights, and the globe. Kevin’s Depth Probe heart became the O in the logo, and the radio waves that run through the titles tip a hat to Peter Saville’s cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.

The moodboards looked at style, color, and imagery, and pulled from gig flyers, album art, and music-imagery.

The titles move through Kevin’s life in eras: disco nights at First Avenue, the Amazon years, the start at KEXP, and the global audience after that. Each era is an animated collage of one or two hero shots of Kevin, and shapes and objects from that period. Some pieces loop so the frame never sits still between transitions. The collages trade off with short full-screen clips from the film, so the sequence works as an intro and a title sequence at once, and it ends on one big collage of every era under the logo.

The style frames ended up pretty close to the finished titles.

Inside the film

The identity carries through the edit. I built Premiere Pro templates (MOGRTs) for the lower thirds and chapter cards, so the editors could change names and titles, flip the layout left or right, and drop in animated brand elements on their own.

The film also has a two-minute animated story. Prince used to bring test pressings to First Avenue and hand them to Kevin to see how the dance floor reacted, and we had almost no footage or photos of it to work with. Pat Moriarity drew it, Ed Raeker did most of the animation, and I directed (and animated some of it). We kept the movement simple on purpose, for the budget and because it suited the drawings. One call I’m still happy with: Prince’s face always stays partly in shadow.

On the festival circuit

RADIOHEART premiered at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival in April 2026, came back for its Best of Fest program, and went on to screen at festivals including SIFF, VIFF, and Iceland Airwaves. Along the way it won Best Direction and the Audience Choice award at the Gig Harbor Film Festival, plus Audience Choice and the jury prize for Best Feature Documentary at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Full credits on IMDb.