In late 2016 I received a call from Digital Kitchen, a creative agency with offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago. I hadn’t heard of them at the time, but looking at their portfolio showed me that I was very familiar with their work. I was honored to work with the award winning creative agency who developed projects like the digital landscape in the Bradley International Terminal at LAX and the title sequences for Six Feet Under and True Blood!
Digital Kitchen and Urban Renaissance Group collaborated with 12 Seattle artists on 22 digital art installations (22 Stories) for the Second and Seneca building lobby in downtown Seattle. The themes and visual stories, uniquely displayed on a series of seven 2×9 foot LCD panels, were created to represent the spirit of Seattle.
My first project, Fireworks, was on display from July 1 through July 15. Rain City ran for the entire month of November – the last day to see it is today!
Melanie collaborated closely with Digital Kitchen in late 2016, creating two commissions for a lobby installation at Second + Seneca in downtown Seattle. As part of the spatial refresh, Melanie’s pieces were activated by DK with subtle animation – a creative partnership that required great communication by Melanie + a willingness to reimagine her creative process. Melanie couldn’t have made it smoother for our team. She was both artist + production partner –her professionalism only to be exceeded by her creative talent. DK looks forward to working with Melanie again + is excited to discover her future work!
I’d like to take you through my creative process from preliminary sketches through final project. Here are some of the early sketches I used when I was developing ideas for the Fireworks theme.
After spending some time in my sketchbook exploring possibilities for the way that the shapes and patterns could look in the animated version, the next step was to create a series of watercolor shapes that Digital Kitchen could choose from to create the final visual story.
Needless to say, seeing the final project come to life was thrilling!
Unfortunately, the day I visited the lobby there was a black bar glitch in the building’s equipment. Please pretend that it is not there.
Here’s a still with Nathaniel and Drew so you can get an idea of scale.
Here’s a peek at the same process I went through for Rain City.
Eeek! You guys, I LOVED working on this project so much. Chelsea and Chris from Digital Kitchen were great to work with and I hope I get a chance to collaborate with them again soon.
If you work for a creative agency and want to collaborate on custom artwork for a client project, please get in touch with me at melanie@melaniebiehle.com. I’d love to see how we could work together on some really cool packaging illustrations, advertising artwork, and obviously, cool ways to combine art with video.
Thank you, Digital Kitchen!
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