Dancing With Shadows /The Transits

The Brief

The Transits are an indie band working remotely between Aotearoa and South Africa. For their track Dancing With Shadows they wanted a music video that could hold the emotional weight of the song. Darkness. Depression. Recovery. Hope.

Turning internal states into visuals that felt raw, poetic and true is not the easiest of challenges, let alone doing it with limited production resources. In this case, the total creative freedom the band offered from the start was crucial and set the tone for a collaborative process based on trust and experimentation.

The Approach

We began by diving into the themes of the song and gathering visual and tonal references from work we love and that connects to this emotional space.

A central metaphor emerged. A world being taken over by shadows, collapsing under emotional weight and emerging back into the light.

With that foundation we worked with the band to shape small narrative threads within that world. Generative AI gave us a way to build worlds succumbing and characters drifting between collapse and clarity.

The Outcome

The final film is not a literal story or illustration to the music, but a visual translation of feeling and companion to it. While it shows individual journeys from descent to emergence, it leaves space for each viewer to bring their own interpretation, meant to be felt more than understood.

The video was covered by international music and creative outlets and featured in an interview on CNN Brazil. But more important than reach, is that it felt aligned with the song. That was always the point.