A dark tale of smartphone culture, electro artist Thom Draft’s ‘Tense’ is one of the most original videos released this year. Not only is it shot entirely on smartphones, Tense is entirely shot by the cast. No film crew, no sophisticated state-of-the-art cameras.

Directed by Thierry Albert - aka Albert Albert - the mobile video centres on a teenage girl who is bullied then discovers she has a bizarre super power leading to a life of fame.

The gritty video is relevant as it taps into the today’s phone-obsessive culture, cyberbullying and the impact of short-lived social media fame.

The fame trap: living life through a phone lens. From the very start, Tense was written for a generation who breathes, lives and dies on their phone. The director created the teenager L, the video’s heroine whose life is all about tension, pain, misery.

Consequently the brief was that everything needed to be shot entirely on smartphones, and the video had to be watched on a phone for maximum impact. As Thierry Albert says “No big fancy camera, no film crew, no cheating.”

Leaving one clear objective: "You are living what L is living. And it’s tense.”

Cyberbullying is a problem addressed head on in Tense. In the US and the UK in 2019, around one in five children aged 10 to 15 years experienced online bullying behaviour. The most common way for children to be bullied via technology was through text or messaging apps (56%).

These are sobering figures that influenced Tense's cautionary tale of living life through a phone lens.

Tense also questions the longevity of social media stardom. In the mobile video, fame happens almost instantly to L as she discovers her super-power - a real flame appears on her middle finger. She’s an Instagram superstar and everyone wants a piece of her.

L’s dark tale of our current state feels so real: going from a bullied nobody to famous in a flash on social media for something utterly bizarre. Only to be upstaged by someone even stranger.

The intention of shooting from the POV of smartphones was to give the video an undeniable authenticity. Featuring a teenage girl called L, we first see her being bullied: a classmate pours urine over in the school toilets while another livestreams the act. L soon explodes into fury and sadness, causing her middle finger to ignite.

L becomes a social media sensation. She creates an Instagram profile, L_is_on_fire, and her posts go viral.

From bully to phenomenon in a split second. People recognise her on the street, ask for selfies, a documentary crew follows her, Instagram followers soar. Like all good things, it can’t last. A kid comes up with a flame on his penis, no one is interested in her burning finger anymore. One day, she’s sick of her finger and chops it off.

All set to the emphatic, pulsating track of up-and-coming French electro-artist Thom Draft.

Director Thierry Albert is an ideas-driven creative who enjoys working fast. Storyboarding is his favourite aspect of pre-production, drawing frames with a pen and paper acknowledging for him that the more prep one does, the easier the shoot. For Tense, the storyboard is almost frame by frame what was shot on smartphones.

The biggest challenge posed by the shoot was to work out who’s filming what on their smartphone. The goal was to feel super-immersive with a POV from three sources: the heroine, one of her bullies, or other characters using their phones to upload the action on social and online platforms like Konbini. The gymnasium scene for example had 10 teenagers filming on their phones. “Leading to a pretty insane job in the editing room with the legendary Jon Echeveste” Thierry remembers.

In February, Thom Draft simultaneously released his first EP ‘Breathtaking' with the official mobile video of Tense directed by Thierry Albert. In just two months, Tense racked up over 34K views on YouTube. It’s a remarkable figure for debut young electro artist: the former architecture student and producer only signed to the French record label Animal63 last year. And an eye-catching, gritty debut for Albert, former creative director who recently moved to directing music videos and commercials.

This mobile video, thanks to its vertical format, was a perfect fit to be published on instagram and create engagement: 90,927 accounts reached, 319 likes, 28 comments and 72 saves, with a big impact of +335 followers since the song release. On Youtube, the other platform used, the numbers speak for themselves: 34,758 views, 63,192 impressions, 29,352 unique viewers, 145 likes and 104 followers gained since being released.