Alone In The Darkness
SIAMÉS
“Alone in the Dark” is about one cold hard truth: in the dark of our skull, we are utterly alone in facing the demons no one else can see. We can try and run— but eventually, we must face the challenge of standing up to anxieties head on or risk being puppeted by our demons our whole lives.
Something's crawling in the dark...
In this story, the audience is the main character. It presented a design challenge: How to make a protagonist that allows a diverse range of people to inhabit their POV as much as possible? The result is a build that is strategically ambiguous and doesn’t belong to a binary gender expression. We leaned into creating a dark black silhouette first, and adding details second to give more humanity, like the glasses and red sneakers. The focal point is their eyes: an open window to their inner light that is initially obscured, then revealed as the character loses their glasses.
Look Development
The demon designs evolve throughout the three acts of the story as the main red demon grows stronger, feeding off the anxieties of the protagonist. The demons grow also in numbers, coalescing into a swarm that literally drowns the character in their fear.
A color script was key to track shifts from blue to red and simple to complex across the music video’s storyline, made from styleframes for every single shot. This was an important tool to visualize shifts in mood and pacing.
MOVING IN DARKNESS
The animation is lush even as the compositions are minimal and stark, leaning into the craft of creating drawings from scratch to bring the darkness to life.
MOVING IN DARKNESS
The animation is lush even as the compositions are minimal and stark, leaning into the craft of creating drawings from scratch to bring the darkness to life.
Animation Process
Our process is always rooted in handdrawn frame-by-frame animation. Many passes were required from our animators to layer the lighting, working from the outside in with hot white rimlight, moving into either blue or red as the midtone, and leaving black as the base.
Not Alone In The Darkness Anymore...
In this music video, the theater of our mind becomes the stage of an epic drama between ourselves and our fears. You may be alone in the dark with your demons. But remember also: your demons are alone in the dark with you, too. Maybe you’re the one they should be afraid of.
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