“Drummer seeks musician to form band.” In “Song for Someone,” we see how Larry Mullen’s school board invitation turned into the biggest rock band in the world.

Bono enlisted our support to bring to life his personal memoir “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story” through a series of four original animations. The first three highlighted intimate moments from his life, mirroring select chapters from his book while the fourth was a fictional account of the book’s release. We leveraged the original illustrations Bono created for each of his chapters and identified an animation artist that matched Bono’s personal aesthetic to uphold the artistic integrity of his sketches. We developed an animation treatment that kept the sincerity of the words and illustrations- executing with childlike simplicity that’s raw and visceral. From storyboards and animatics, we created original sound design to compliment the iconic narration of Bono. Color was also introduced episodically, starting with simple black and white into multi-color to gradually show the culmination of his life’s moments in the book in full color.

To promote the release of Bono’s memoir and book tour, we released each animation during key moments from his life, such as his birthday, Bono and his wife Ali’s 40th wedding anniversary, Larry Mullen’s birthday and the eve of book’s release to generate deeper sentiment with each new episode’s release. For “Song for Someone,” the episode about U2’s formation, we even partnered with Rolling Stone to release the animation via their website and social media. These animations were received with love and admiration from U2 fans with the series garnering a total 2.5 million total views across all of U2’s socials worldwide. After the four animations were released and Bono made a few talk show appearances, the book debuted at number 2 on the New York Times’ nonfiction best seller list. The book’s success led to a 14-city book tour across North America and Europe with a full house.