SC250 — Sestercentennial of the American Revolution in South Carolina
Chernoff Newman · 2023 · Concept, Art Direction
SC250 is the state commission chartered by the South Carolina General Assembly to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, with a mandate to include the role of African Americans in the war.
The Challenge
Most Americans place the Revolution in Massachusetts and Virginia. Lexington, Valley Forge, Yorktown. South Carolina hosted more battles and skirmishes than any other state and almost nobody knows it. So the campaign wasn't fighting indifference, it was fighting a version of the story people were already confident about. And it had to reach an audience that reflexively tunes out anything that looks like a history lesson.
The Truth
The problem was believability, not awareness. "The Revolutionary War was won in South Carolina" sounds like state pride talking. Any campaign that simply asserted it would get filed next to every other tourism claim. The line needed something that made people stop and check rather than nod and move on.
The Work
The concept borrowed the most familiar phrase in film marketing and broke it.
Based On A True Story, with "Based On" struck through. What's left is A True Story.
Three words doing the work of a paragraph. The strikethrough signals that this isn't dramatization or heritage myth-making, it's documented history, and it does it in a visual language the audience already reads fluently from movie posters. Bold typography against period imagery, treated with the confidence of contemporary film campaigns rather than the reverence usually applied to Revolutionary War material.
The device also solves the mandate. A campaign built on "what you were told isn't the whole story" makes room for the parts of South Carolina's Revolution that get left out, including the role of African Americans the commission was specifically chartered to include. The correction isn't a separate message. It's the whole idea.
