A feature documentary, an anniversary identity and a listening-room website for a Lagos label turning ten, all made by one team on one schedule.
The brief
Harmattan Records is a Lagos label that has spent a decade putting out the sound of the city, from highlife revivals to the first wave of Afrobeats. For its tenth anniversary the founders wanted more than a compilation. They wanted the story told properly, by the people who lived it.
They came to us with a shoebox of tapes, a handful of interviews and one condition: it had to feel like the music, not like a corporate retrospective.
We proposed a feature-length documentary, a new identity for the anniversary year and a home for all of it online. One team, one schedule, one voice from the first interview to the last frame.
Over fourteen weeks we shot in eleven locations across Lagos and Ibadan, restored forty hours of archive audio and built the site while the edit was still in progress.
Listening before shooting
Before a camera came out we spent three weeks listening. Every artist, engineer and promoter was asked the same question: what did it sound like when it was new?
The answers became the film’s spine. Chapters follow the records, not the calendar, and the picture cuts on the beat wherever the footage allowed it.
Identity and website
The anniversary identity borrows from the label’s original sleeves: one flat colour, one big mark, no decoration. It works as a poster, a vinyl label and a favicon without changing.
Type is set tight and large, in the same spirit as the old pressing plates.
The website is a listening room first. Every release plays in place, the film sits at the centre of the home page, and the archive can be explored by year, by city or by who played on what.
It was designed and built alongside the edit, so scenes from the film and pages of the site share the same grid.
We expected a film. We got a film, a brand and a website that all sound like us. Nobody had to translate between teams.
The result
The documentary premiered at the label’s anniversary night to a full house and went on to open two festivals. The soundtrack album, restored from the original tapes, reached the national top ten in its first week.
Traffic to the new site tripled in the launch month, with listeners spending an average of nine minutes in the archive. The label now runs its releases through the same site and the same identity.