Google Play Music needed to stand out in Australia’s crowded streaming landscape, where similar song catalogues and comparable pricing means there’s little differentiating one service from another in the eyes of users.

Our objective was to set Google Play Music apart, increase brand awareness and position it as an innovator in the music space and a contributor to the local industry.

Through the Dark tells the story of a father and his son’s battle with leukemia. The interactive film is told in two halves, the Dark and the Light, with matching imagery revealed by rotating your mobile. For example, black footsteps in white snow become white roots in black soil.

We see father and son in a series of situations, together and apart: walking through the snow, in hospital, under a streetlight, inside an MRI scanner, under the stars.

Reflecting the intense emotions that a battle with cancer can bring, powerful imagery features throughout.

A black wolf. Black crows. In one climactic scene, the son’s boat plummets into the Dark and he swirls underwater, until later swimming back towards the Light.

Father and son face danger and isolation, turmoil and calm, until finally walking side-by-side through the snow again. The son now takes his own path, leaving his father behind.

The lyrics were our narrative guide: powerful words that convey a tangible sense of a father’s world turned upside down by his son’s illness.

To bring them to life, we crafted two complete worlds existing in parallel, the Light and the Dark, to represent the emotional highs and lows of caring for someone who’s battling cancer. The result is a seamlessly flowing interactive film where users navigate their own path through fear towards hope by rotating their mobile device.

Driven entirely by code, the film is rendered in real-time in the mobile browser. To allow users to move between the two worlds, the cameras were mapped to the mobile device’s accelerometer.