Director's Works
Orville Peck, Drift Away Steph Jowett, Tilly Robba
Tilly Robba and Steph Jowett are an international emmy nominated writing and directing duo, collectively known as Studio Antics. They love building peculiar worlds that balance artistry with a bit of antics, inspired by their visual arts background, both being raised by artist parents.
They are currently in development on their debut narrative feature film.
When we first heard the track 'Drift Away', we were instantly taken back to our 17-year-old selves. As two queer kids who grew up in small towns, Tilly in Australia and Steph in New Zealand, we wanted this video to feel like a love letter to who we were then.
This music video taps into the restless boredom of youth and those afternoons where you invent your own world because the real one offers nothing back. Our characters are young, isolated, and out of step with the place they’ve grown up in. Some are misfits by personality, others simply because the town doesn’t know how to hold them.
Tonally, the piece moves between sweet melancholy and hopeful 16mm cinematic joy, told through a series of loose vignettes each unfolding in a different corner of their town throughout the day. We were very much inspired by new queer cinema films of the 90s and early 2000s.
Orville’s performance on a dimly lit, ambiguous stage becomes the spine of the video, threading through the misfits’ vignettes as he sings straight to camera. He sits in a liminal space where maybe he was once one of them; maybe he’s the unseen storyteller holding their world together.
