The rose finally opens
We finally enter the rose. It’s the one we’ve been seeing since “Don’t Say Goodbye,” and here it comes to swallow us. “Dreamland Newborn” turned out to be interesting to work with for that reason: playing with Franck’s art direction, and with how blurred or sharp that rose gets.
At first I wanted us to actually travel into the rose. Working through the effects, I locked the rose’s opening to the volume intensity of Will’s voice. Those opening and closing effects read as something very organic to me, a back-and-forth, and I think that fits the song’s title perfectly. To my eyes and ears, this is an extremely sensual track; it’s probably the brightest, most pop, and maybe the lightest song on the whole album, and in N U I T’s whole discography.
Sensuality without a silhouette
My question going in was basically: how do you materialize sensuality without just pointing a camera at a silhouette? I liked the idea instead of two people getting lost in each other’s shapes, a kind of falling in love that isn’t quite love; something more sensual than that, more animal.
I really like how simple the lyrics are here, in the same way I liked them in “Let Me Disappear (Inside),” and I think that simplicity works well against a flower that keeps growing through the video.
Several versions, looking for balance
I went through several versions of this one, mostly because I was rarely satisfied, either with the colorimetry or with how the on-screen text was appearing. I keep coming back to that back-and-forth motion because it reads as a real exchange between two things, and I like what happens toward the end of it. The goal there was to keep the softness without tipping into repetition, even though the song itself repeats quite a bit. Finding that balance took a few tries, but I think it landed.
Spotify Canvas loop created from this visualizer
See you next week for “The Blinding.” The full series lives on the N U I T _ Alt Real case study.