Stained glass is an interactive music video for the New Jersey band, Real Estate. We couldn’t decide on the colors, so in this video, fans decide. As the animation is running, fans can color in the video to their liking by dropping colors onto the outlined panels — which, in an unbelievable coincidence, resembles stained glass windows. Intentionally a browser-based experience, fans can visit the website with their phones, tablets, or laptops, color their own unique music video, and share it with their friends. To create the animations, band members lip-synced the song in front of a green screen on green treadmills. We then traced the live-action shots frame by frame to create the outline animations.

From first page load to final coloring click, fans should feel like they’re living inside and exploring the visual manifestation of a Real Estate song. To ensure a seamless beginning and end to the video, a cyclical storytelling-element bookends the experience—the band members are originally “birthed” from magical cocoons at the beginning and after walking through the magical forest performing their song, return to their same pods at the end. The pods serve to represent the potential energy a fans releases by beginning the experience. Just as importantly, though, this visual device allows users to replay, restart, share at the end of the experience without interruption using a consistent view of the isolated cocoons.

We started by shooting the band on green screen walking on treadmills—timing out moments in the video in real time. Then, frame-by-frame animation was crafted over the top of this footage to create more realistic movement. An intense period of development and research was required to discover what web technologies would actually allow us to pull off the vision. The musical, technical, and animation pieces to this puzzle were woven together over the course of a few months. The experience was then launched alongside Real Estate’s tour schedule to much fanfare.

The fans reacted very positively to the launch. On average, they spent nearly four minutes on the site, engaging with the video and sharing their experience on social media. The end result was thousands of unique Stained Glass music videos made by the fans themselves pouring onto the internet. Stained Glass won multiple awards, and went on to be voted one of the top 15 videos of 2017 by Thrillist.com. Most importantly, the video propelled the song to a top single for the band, resulting in an exclusive 7” vinyl pressing and a successful tour.