The spot is grainy and damp from the outset, with a brooding under-tone enhanced by the derelict setting in which viewers find a series of uniformed women.
The women remain synchronised in their movements, which are powerful, intense, and threatening, showcasing choreography which mimics militant actions to depict a sense of violence and anger.
The spot continues to grow in it’s intensity throughout, beginning with the discs with CG refractions as they build in their erratic movement throughout the spot.
Drawn to the spectacle of the discs, the dancers seem to imitate the frenzy in their own choreography, passing dead bodies on the floor, which sees the promo maintain a feeling of possession and unease.
Mill 2D Lead Artist Feral Hendrick comments; 'It was really interesting working with Director Young Replicant, and trying to curate how the light in the shots motivates the narrative of the story.
We encouraged the light to interact with the refraction discs, reflecting that light into the surrounding scenes and environment, and straight into the camera lens to create a holographic visual.
The discs themselves were a combination of shot plates and CG, animated to give the story progression. It was really important to us that the look and feel motivated the actions in these shots, and that the discs and lighting effects became more frenzied and erratic, mimicking the dancers and building the spots intensity until the last disc falls and the film ends.’
Mill Colorist Oisin O’Driscoll adds; ‘Working with Director Young Replicant was quite an honour for me, I've been a long-standing fan of his work and was very much into the track and treatment from an early stage.
This drove me to research a lot of styles and looks in advance of working on the material. We tried a number of effects and decided to start with strong colour separation and strong mid tone contrasts would be best suited to the narrative of the track.
Challenges arose when creating strong mid-tone contrasts as we wanted to preserve the highlights and shadows. To overcome this and create a more controlled look we reduced the contrast and added a blue-green tint to enhance the stylistic content of the video.
I wanted to create a powerful yet pristine look so I added a slight sharpen to the shadows in order to enhance definition and subsequently de-saturated the black tones.
The result was a clean and diverse image that maintains all the frame’s details, which I felt was very important in order for the viewer to fully connect with the movement of the piece.
In the final stages of the grade, I worked on the highlights to create consistency and add further naturalism to the images.
Each shot has amazing composition, choreography, cinematography and colour and I hope the viewer enjoys the images as much as I do.’