Summer of Soul.

A cinematic record of Milwaukee’s premier summer concert series, produced for the organization building inclusive community spaces through culture and design.

Culture x Design is a Milwaukee-based organization dedicated to fostering inclusive community spaces that enrich the city’s unique identity and nurture a sense of belonging. Summer of Soul is their flagship public event, an annual concert series that generates the kind of communal energy that defines a city’s cultural character. What it lacked was a cinematic record capable of carrying that energy forward, building institutional identity over time, and giving the event the cultural weight its audience already assigned to it.

JMC was brought in for full-service production: concept development, narrative strategy, direction, cinematography, and post. The strategic decision was to frame the series not as documentation of what happened, but as evidence of what Summer of Soul is. A permanent fixture of Milwaukee’s cultural life. Every production choice, from interview structure to editorial pacing, was made in service of that framing. The result is a firm that functions as both a record and an argument: that Culture x Design is building something that lasts.