​Afterhrs. opens for creative collaborations

A new content studio Afterhrs. founded by Thelonious Brooks and Kai Regan, has launched to tell stories that connect with audiences through emotion, artfulness, inclusion, and craft. 

Afterhrs. is purpose-built to bring compelling, diverse, and original talent to brand engagement and longform entertainment, backed by experience across all mediums. As the name implies, Afterhrs. is the time and place where imagination is the cultural currency.

Longtime friends, collaborators, and now partners, Thelonious Brooks and Kai Regan, Producer and Director respectively, came of age with the street scene in New York, the ingenuity and artfulness of which permeated and informed their work in various genres: branded content, music videos, films, and multimedia experiences. Among them, the award-winning features We Are Not Cats directed by Xander Robin and Director Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler. Last year, their pilot These Days, produced with Peter Saraf and Big Beach, was featured in the Indie series section of Sundance. Brooks also produced the pilot presentation for Starz' widely celebrated Vida also for Big Beach.

Over the years, the duo also found a calling in the curation of artist development; inclusive and diverse talent whose storytelling was genuine, lush, culturally astute and strikingly beautiful. Taking stories to the fore, whether for pure entertainment or with a lightly branded touch, was a through line for their careers. The discovery process helped drive a desire to add a unique value proposition to business as usual with a new vantage point on production: one that provided opportunities for storytellers and, in so doing, delivers content that audiences crave. Streamlined, transparent, deliberate, with a healthy dose of the joy that comes with making and sharing something they believe in.

“We are at the end of an era where the paradigm has shifted and provided insight into how we move forward. It’s the moment to harness the entrepreneurial spirit and have the work serve the story - not be the story,” explains co-founder Thelonious Brooks. “There’s an unstoppable force that is filmmaking, we create because we are compelled to do so. It’s a process that deserves to be humanized and celebrated.”

“Aftehrs. studio was founded by the necessity to align the ‘common wealths’ perspective on the dialogue between creativity and commerce,” agrees Co-Founder Kai Regan. “We wanted to create a safe haven for artists that we believe in, to create a platform to serve their vision and create opportunities to tell stories with authenticity and purpose. We are the apparatus to encourage and attract collaborators who feel the same. We wanted to build something for the now generation we wish we had access to.”