Through The Dark

A collaboration with Google Play Music and #1 selling Australian artist Hilltop Hoods, Through The Dark a made-for-mobile interactive film for the song of the same title which was written by Hoods frontman for his young son who was diagnosed with leukemia at eight years old. The interactive film shares a father and son’s journey through two animated worlds — the dark representing fear and the light representing hope. Using 3D cameras mapped to the phone’s accelerometer, the device is tilted and rotated to allow the fan to control their version of the two worlds.The story is told in fourteen scenes, each of which was 3D modeled and animated in Maya, then rendered in real-time in the browser with WebGL and the Web Audio API. To allow the user to move between the two worlds, the team then mapped the cameras to the phone’s accelerometer (and to the mouse on desktop). Simplified 3D meshes and rigs were built to tell the story, lighting was designed by hand, and new tools were developed to bridge traditional animation methods and WebGL.