CHILLIN ISLAND
ELARA PICTURES
New York City natives and rap personalities Alec “Despot” Reinstein, Ashok “Dap” Kondabolu, and Aleksey “Lakutis” Weintraub invite their friends to join them at the edge of nature. Why? To commune in deserts and swamps in a valiant effort to reveal unknowable truths from the dreamstate of the shared human existence. Chillin Island features music industry icons, including Young Thug, Lil Yachty, Rosalía, Gunna, Killer Mike, Ski Mask the Slump God, Lil Tecca, and Coi Leray, plus Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koening. Watch the series on HBO Max HERE.
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This project all started as an idea 4 years before we aired on HBO max. I got a call from my friend Oscar about a pilot being shot out in Monument Valley, UT. The team was lean. The budget was small. So I decided to jump in and record the production sound to give this pilot as much of a fighting chance as I could. 4 years after chasing around Alec, Dapp, Lex, and Ski Mask in the desert, we’ve found ourselves with something that was bigger than we had initially imagined — a 6 part series featuring incredible guest talent, in a variety of intriguing locations, with original music, beautiful cinematography, and VFX to boot.
The approach to Chillin Island had to be different. I didn’t push for an over commercialised sound scape. I didn’t want the show to feel like a giant trailer. It was to feel real, placed, and intimate when it needed to be. Yet, the soundtrack could stretch to feel huge when the time was right. The conversation is the show, and highlighting that was the main objective.
[slide-right]Chillin Island
Production Company: Elara Pictures
Client: HBO Max
Task: Sound Design and Mix[/slide-right]
STILLS
