PAY THE BILLS
Inspired by my journey navigating the music industry as a multimedia artist, PTBs transcends industry and speaks about the common struggle many creatives encounter as they balance commercial succcessful and genuineness. “Love can’t pay the bills, so why’d you think a pitty party will?” Meaning, passion alone isn’t enough and neither is complaining and whining. Website
Roles
Creative Director
Graphic Designer
Music Artist
Team
Matthew Rose
Lobulo
James Volpe
Ben Mirroner
Product Owner
Matt Rose
Demion Riddick
Tools
Photoshop
Illustrator
Logic X
After Effects
Premiere Pro
Originally produced Ben Mironer, also know as Super Moon, the instrumental was iterated on, adding new instrumentation to enhance the live feel. Being a huge proponent of collaboration, we worked with several instrumentalists (bass guitar, rhythm guitar, trumpet, etc.), vocalists (Joe Luca, Dani Vaughn, etc.), and an engineer, Texas Drew, to perfect the sonics before switching gears to the visuals.
I’ve always had an affinity for paper — the look, the feel and the smell. Metaphorically, since the song was written about money or paper we thought it would be a great concept to have the artwork completely constructed out of paper. Working with an awesome designer and creative dirctor based in London, Lobulo, we endeavored to create the cover art for PTB. In a world where digital art reigns supreme, we wanted the all our artwork to be as tangible as money itself, as real as the obsticles we’ve encountered along our journey, and as vibrant an playful as the overall song itself. Below are sketches and a rendered example of a draft idea from early in our creative process.
Even as we created a song about a shortage of money, we experienced the limitation of a tiny budget. Thankfully, my network was strong and many creatives love to get behind one another’s passion projects. One such creative is James Volpe, designer and structural egineer who specializes in cardboard and paper. If you’ve ever been to a movie theatre (pre-COVID) or to a Walmart, you’ve probably have seen or experienced his handywork. James and I teamed up to design a build a music video set (albeit much smaller than we originally planned). With over 1,200 individual sheets of paper, and hundreds of hand-folded oragami roses, it was nothing less than a labor of love.
The set was only the beginning. After capturing an abridged version of our original ideas (too long to expand here, but ask me about it) I spent 25+ hours drawing animations within After Effects to help bring more energy to a few static shots. I used AstroPad (pre-SideCar) to mirror my MacBook Screen to my iPad and used my Apple Pencil to manually draw over 1440 individual frames.
