Danae Gosset animates visuals for the tenth anniversary of Mac Miller’s Go:od AM

Danae founded the animation studio Pencil TV in 2021, the same year Miller McCormick, Mac Miller’s brother, reached out about a collaboration for the Mac Miller estate. Danae was already a fan, first encountering Miller’s back in 2010 with the release of his mixtape K.i.d.s. “His sensitivity and the emotion in his work really resonates with me on a deep level,” Danae says.

The original project encompassed three visualisers for the mixtape Faces, alongside animation for the Making Faces documentary and, in 2023, the collaboration continued, this time resulting in a video for the unreleased version of Mac Miller’s The Star Room and visualisers for Millers’ Balloonerism album for its 2025 release. Now comes the third instalment of Danae’s Mac Miller work; a series of animations to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the rappers Go:od AM album.

The project was made in collaboration with Sam Balaban, the Go:od AM (Time Flies, Try to Catch It!) documentary’s director, and Miller McCormick. The collaboration spans across a music video for track Rush Hour, visuals for the documentary and three visualisers. The animated visualisers draw on the albums visual motifs – clocks, dinosaurs, and the sun – as well as it’s concepts: journeys, escapism, lightness and heaviness “For the visualisers, we explored this playful breakfast cereal-inspired world, something immersive and bright without bring childish,” shares Danae.

Throughout the project, Danae used mostly cel animation – a process whereby each frame of the animation is handmade on see through plastic sheets – enhanced with 3D elements. It’s clear an immense amount of time and dedication was required, but it doesn’t make it any less surprising to learn each of the 2200+ frames of the Rush Hour video was painted by hand. “It took an insane amount of experimentation to reach the right feel,” Danae says, she hadn’t yet worked with watercolour animation much.

Rush Hour was the most tactile, most challenging and most rewarding part of the collective project, sitting in a pressure cooker of an intense deadline, directing across multiple time zones and working with a medium new to her. Each painted frame was scanned, cleaned, aligned, and composited to create the finished result, topped off post colour and texture passes.

The documentary animations were born from testing ideas and techniques rather than a traditional storyboarding process. Danae, Miller and Sam followed the tone of the scenes and voice over, “keeping the frame by frame technique in mind which helped translate movement and meaning in a way that feels very honest and pure,” Danae says.

Danae’s distinct animation style developed while studying at New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA). She was mentored by Carin Goldberg, Gail Anderson and Debbie Millman, but it wasn’t until an assignment, to create everyday, from teacher Pablo Delcan that things clicked creatively for the animator. “My apartment became an experimental lab and that daily practice formed the foundational ethos of the work I do,” she says.

This experimental approach developed and evolved with her graphic design footing, citing works such as Cecile Starr and Robert Russett’s Experimental Animation and Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking as formative to her craft. On an art direction level, Danae is drawn to minimalism and abstraction, and is pulled towards the graphic, “but always in a space where emotion and structure can coexist in a coherent way”, says Danae.

Mixed-media techniques beyond the confines of the screen is where Danae’s future fixations lie; she’s interested in exploring how physical and spatial installations can collide, and excited by the prospect of expanding animation into the tangible world through new spaces and collaborations. This collaboration with the Mac Miller estate marks just the beginning of Danae’s animated experimentations.