THROUGH THE DARK

Short List
TitleTHROUGH THE DARK
BrandGOOGLE
Product / ServiceGOOGLE PLAY MUSIC
CategoryE04. Technological Achievement in Digital Craft
EntrantR/GA SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Idea Creation R/GA SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Media Placement ESSENCE DIGITAL Singapore, SINGAPORE
PR POEM GROUP Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Production R/GA SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Production 2 EXIT FILMS Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Production 3 XYZ STUDIOS Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Hamish Stewart R/GA Sydney EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Michael Armstrong R/GA Sydney CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Blake Kus R/GA Sydney ASSOCIATE TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR
Jess Bateman R/GA Sydney DESIGNER
Shruti Rai R/GA Sydney SENIOR EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
Aaron George R/GA Sydney SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Kate Allan R/GA Sydney COPYWRITER
Justine Cusack R/GA Sydney SOCIAL STRATEGIST
Cory Nicely R/GA Sydney MARKETING SCIENCES MANAGER
Julia Rush R/GA Sydney PRODUCER
Natalie Brend R/GA Sydney SENIOR ACCOUNT DIRECTOR
Jeff Donios R/GA Sydney SENIOR TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR
Gertjan Leppers R/GA Sydney EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION DIRECTOR
Mike Daly Exit Films DIRECTOR
Kim Wildenburg Exit Films EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Marco Palmieri XYZ Studios LEAD ANIMATOR
Richard Osellame XYZ Studios SENIOR TD
Stevie Watkins XYZ Studios CG LEAD
Garett Mayow XYZ Studios EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Eran Hilleli XYZ Studios LEAD DESIGNER
Gina Moore XYZ Studios CG ARTIST
Tim Murphy XYZ Studios CG ARTIST
Heath Pagram XYZ Studios ANIMATOR
Eran Hilleli XYZ Studios ANIMATION DIRECTOR

The Campaign

Google Play Music needed to stand out in Australia’s crowded streaming landscape where there’s little differentiating platforms in the eyes of users. To set them apart, increase brand awareness and position the platform as an innovator, our idea was to create exclusive content that fans would love: an immersive music video with unprecedented interactivity. We collaborated with local hip-hop legends Hilltop Hoods. Their track, Through The Dark, is a deeply personal song written by band member Dan Smith (MC Pressure) about his son Liam’s battle with leukemia. Raw and real, the song connected deeply with audiences. Our idea was to bring that to life, translating conflicting emotions into something conveying the sense of a father’s world turned upside down. Users move through simultaneous 3D worlds, The Dark and The Light, by rotating their mobile device and navigating a journey through fear towards hope.

Creative Execution

We meticulously mapped two complete worlds that exist in parallel, The Dark and The Light, to represent the ups and downs of fighting cancer. The result: a seamlessly flowing interactive film where users navigate their own path from fear through to hope, simply by rotating their mobile device. Driven entirely by code, the film is rendered in real-time in the mobile browser. To allow users to move between the two worlds, the cameras were mapped to the mobile device’s accelerometer. In build, we used the latest web standards, and created bespoke dev tools to allow fly-throughs in WebGL. Designed in Maya, each scene consisted of the geometry of the environment, shaders, lighting, cameras, camera paths and characters. To translate all of this from Maya into the mobile browser, any characters with skeletal systems were exported individually as Three.js JSON Objects, with the rest exported as a COLLADA scene.

Links

Website URL