Flying High, Longlist - Music Video

Future Islands, For Sure

Sam Mason

In this music video for the Future Islands song "For Sure", Hornet Director Sam Mason creates a fully animated 3D video about two autonomous cars finding love in a hopeless place. The film follows two cars as they court each other in a choreographed cross-country love dance all across various landscapes pockmarked with relics of longgone human civilizations. Eventually, the two cars run out of gas and end up next to each other. It’s a love song and a love story told in the most futuristic form: CG digital filmmaking. In terms of narrative, Sam was inspired by the almost meditative calm that had settled over the world in the immediate fallout of coronavirus lockdown. In his words, “I felt like the song called for something reacting to our time and what we’ve been going through. And my first instincts were to play off a post-apocalyptic thing, where nature had rather beautifully taken back over. I imagined this beautiful, calm world where nature came back and quickly forgot about people. But not in a dystopian way. More like an optimistic Garden of Eden.” The tricky part was figuring out how to create the film in total isolation while in the midst of COVID-19 lockdown. Thankfully, Sam is a director who loves to poke and prod and experiment with technical boundaries. He opted for a world built totally in CG. "I thought of it as a futuristic way to make a film in isolation. And I think it was conceptually interesting to make something that felt like a live action film using all these hacked together digital ways of working. Looking forward, I think more work can be done this way."

Sam Mason is a designer, director, and CG whiz known for creating unique, immersive worlds and beautiful, fantastical landscapes. He is always excited about applying a style of CG that reflects his lo-fi/hi-fi hybrid approach to making things. He prefers to utilize emerging technologies to apply a physicality and textured realness to his films. He especially likes to start with real objects and from there set up constraints that he can work within