ROARK had the pleasure of collaborating with upcoming producer Dom Hurley on a music video to promote his latest EP release “Easy”. Hurley is an artist / producer / songwriter from Bend, Oregon currently living and working in Nashville, Tennessee.

Story Development

 

The project started out with a conversation between Dom Hurley and Adrian Letechipia, creative director of ROARK. In that conversation, Hurley’s approach to creating music and his origins as a musician were discussed. Heavily rooted in hip-hop and hailing from Bend, Oregon, Hurley’s personal background set the stage for the main storyline of the video.

 

Deep in the forests of Oregon, a band of close friends throws down a beatbox session. Each character has its own sonic voice informed by its particular background story, body movement and shape. Together they all party and have great time creating music together until inevitably, things get a little crazy and one of them gets overly excited bringing everything to a crashing halt.

Character Design

 

ROARK enlisted the talent of I-Nu Yeh, a Brooklyn, NY based illustrator and art director known for her quirky characters and overall love of monsters. Having read over the creative brief profiling the cast of characters, Yeh created multiple iterations of each character based on the individual personalities assigned to each frequency and sound. The sketching process began with paper and pencil in a very loose form to keep the characters feeling fun and almost childlike. Once the base forms and silhouettes were established, the sketches were moved into digital form to allow for further exploration and final design execution. Yeh was also responsible for art directing the final look of the video after animation was completed.

Animation

 

Adrian Letechipia of ROARK took the finished vector artwork that Yeh created and using a combination of 3D and 2D animation software, brought the characters to life. Each character was animated individually to line up with their respective sounds and frequencies for the duration of the track and then inserted into the same world environment.

The music video for “Forests” was accepted as part of an art show in New York City called #PLAYGREEN which took place at the Con Artist Collective in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The opening show drew in a crowd of around 250-300 people throughout the reception night and was DJ’d by Conrad Clifton and Adrian Letechipia.