The brief, from musician Woodkid, was to create a film that captured the feeling of being swallowed by the world around you. He was interested in a futuristic animated video that could reflect the duality of the song, which features his voice and a Japanese kids choir. We were tasked with incorporating the choir into the film, along with the environmental and elemental concepts from the album, S16.

Our solution was to create an abstracted visual experience exposing a landscape's pain; juxtaposing extraction and eruption of the land with Woodkid and the choir's verses in a duet. We treated the choir as a personification of nature, using their choreography and vocal chants to externalize the lands emotion. We leveraged CGI's scale to build massive structures that dwarfed the worlds inhabitants.

Reactor was made using 3D animation, motion capture and simulation. The character animation was realized through a combination of choreographed motion capture in UE5 and hand keyframed animation in Maya. In order to make the environment feel as alive as our characters, we built custom tools in Houdini that were used to create hundreds of fluid and smoke simulations. Clusters of digital lights were then layered over the emission points of the simulation to drive the films cinematography, which was inspired by natural eruptions. The look was finalized by adding heat distortion effects in Nuke.

Set in an imagined future shaped by megastructures and industrialization, Reactor is a depiction of the last kids on Earth. It explores the struggling relationship between a cataclysmic landscape and the humans who consume its resources. The film's abstract yet realistic animation, ethereal chants, and visceral imagery form a striking portrait of our collective bond to nature.

Reactor is an homage to the golden age of Japanese Anime - it features the Suginami Junior Choir, a chorus in Japan known for bringing vocals to the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

The project draws inspiration from the animated films Akira and Ghost In The Shell, in addition to the man made and natural disasters of Fukushima and Pompeii

The music video received widespread press upon release and has garnered over 600K views online.