Neon Pulse

Context

Aurora Records approached us with a bold vision: a music video that feels like watching analog television through a digital prism. The artist's sound — raw, distorted, deeply physical — demanded visuals that matched that tension.

The brief was deceptively simple: make it feel broken, but beautiful.

Conflict

Three constraints defined the project:

1. Budget — No studio shoots. Everything had to be captured guerrilla-style on location.
2. Timeline — 3 weeks from brief to delivery. The single was dropping on a fixed date.
3. Technical — The artist wanted real 35mm grain, not a plugin. We sourced expired film stock and scanned it at 4K.

The challenge: how do you composite hand-scanned film frames with real-time particle systems without it looking like a Frankenstein composite?

Process

We started with moodboards that mapped the collision between analog texture and digital precision. Key references: Chris Cunningham's early work, Gaspar Noé's color language, and glitch art from the early 2000s.

The edit structure followed the music's dynamics — hard cuts on transients, slow dissolves during ambient sections. Every transition was motivated by the audio, not arbitrary.

Color grading was done entirely in DaVinci Resolve, with a custom LUT built from the actual film stock's characteristics.

Resolution

The final piece runs 4:12 and exists at a crossroads — it's simultaneously lo-fi and hyper-produced. Every frame carries the texture of the film stock and the precision of digital compositing.

The video reached 2.4M views in the first month and drove a 340% increase in the artist's streaming numbers. More importantly, it established a visual language that Aurora Records now uses across their entire roster.