While performing Stained Glass, the band members take a casual stroll across a continuously scrolling, fantastical environment—this prompt served as the video’s creative foundation. The environment is meant to feel like a magical wilderness with fun, trippy twists and turns. We wanted fans to be a part of this journey and make it their own.

The visuals draw heavily on that of actual stained glass. The video (as well as user interface elements) implement thin and stark lines, like the borders that separate stained cells. The video begins with no color, then slowly adds more and more empty elements. The user is responsible for selecting their own stain color and painting the moving pieces of glass.

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.

Real Estate, as a band, captures and represents the youthful, independent spirit of today. Particularly the smooth tones and flowing lyrics of one of their recent hit tracks, Stained Glass, conjure fantastic imagery of a wandering soul. The interactive music video is a perfect and unique match for the song; both combine for a first-of-its kind online experience. After establishing clear vision for what the interactive video should be, we employed Lions-level ingenuity to invent new ways of allowing users to interact with video through web browsers and connect even more closely with the music.

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.

Domino Records came to us with a wide-open request—create an engaging video for Stained Glass to release with the announcement of Real Estate’s upcoming tour schedule. Our only guiding principle of the project was to engage and reward fans. This sort of freedom allowed the video to develop very naturally, creatively, and unhindered. And so very early on, ideas started coalescing around an “interactive coloring-book” concept to pair with a stained glass aesthetic. We wanted fans to be able to color their own version of the Stained Glass music video and share it with friends. Acknowledging the importance of quick, low-barrier access, it was decided this should be a browser-based experience.