Riley Max Releases YEAR ONE Music Video With Stop-Motion Animation
The Colorado-born artist's animated segment is also on display at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
Colorado-born singer-songwriter Riley Max has released the new single and music video 'Year One,' a folk pop track that explores her personal struggles with mental and physical health. The music video fuses real-life segments with stop-motion animation.
At 21, Riley Max is a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies Art, Film and Visual Studies. She is also the music director of The Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones and appears in a variety of musical theater productions. Her background as a cover artist and comic creator for the Harvard Independent, paired with her skills as a composer, will serve as the basis of her undergraduate thesis this coming year, which will take the form of a fully animated short film.
Her debut album ROY G BIV, written and recorded at 18, earned acclaim from Atwood Magazine and Guitar Girl Magazine, and her sophomore album is set for release this fall.
Riley Max shared the inspiration behind the new single: 'I wrote “Year One” when I was having a really tough time during my first year at Harvard. I was coming back from having some issues with my vocal chords, and I was dealing with a lot of other mental and physical health issues, as well as being completely and totally responsible for my life for the first time ever. It was a lot. I wasn't sure when—or if—I was ever going to start feeling like myself again, musically or otherwise. So this song means a lot to me, because every time I listen to it I remember how far I've come. The animation was completed in a class that I took last year, and I knew immediately once I finished it that I had to turn it into a full music video, because I was really happy with the way it turned out. It was so rewarding to be able to express my feelings through such a uniquely creative medium, and it really made me fall in love with stop motion animation even more — to the point that I'm going to pursue a stop-motion thesis this year! It's always a joy to be able to combine my many artistic loves.'
The music video's animated segment is currently on display at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, as part of the exhibit No Slop, No Second Screen: Animation–the hard-won image.
