We started with one of Australia's best-known and most loved acts: Hilltop Hoods. Their track, Through The Dark, is a deeply personal song written by band member Dan Smith (MC Pressure) about his son Liam’s battle with leukemia.

Raw and real, the song connected deeply with audiences. The idea was to bring that to life, translating its conflicting emotions into something that would give a sense of a father’s world turned upside down and a journey through fear towards hope.

The ambition was to create an immersive digital experience where users navigate through two simultaneous 3D worlds, The Dark and The Light, by rotating their mobile device.

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.

Through the Dark transformed the Hilltop Hoods’ song into an immersive digital experience, meticulously rendering the two complete worlds so that users could move between them with unprecedented interactivity.

Digital technologies were pushed to their limit, positioning Google Play Music as an innovator in the crowded, streaming landscape.

With over 400,000 unique user interactions, social share of voice for Google Play Music doubled to 24%.

And best of all, the thousands raised for CanTeen helped launch Side of Stage: an initiative conceived by the band to help young Australians living with cancer access live music and meet their favourite artists.