The High King’s Daughter

A second collaboration with Kurt Rosenberg and his team at Armada, built alongside a song recorded in London and loosely framed around the era of Brian Boru, Ireland’s first high king — a forbidden romance between a stable boy and the high king’s daughter. Joël worked across three fronts: fine-tuning story arcs with Mike and Logan Halsey so the visuals carry their own half of the story rather than simply illustrating the lyrics; developing the look with Art Director Archer Dougherty, pairing a textured 2D style with an illuminated-manuscript-inspired dream sequence; and building a new production pipeline in Unreal Engine 5.3, including a camera-projection technique used across nearly every shot to hold onto that 2D look inside a 3D engine.