DEH PON DI LOW - DIGITALDA
Art Direction, 2D Animation & Illustration
Digitalda was an important young artist in the French female Dancehall scene, who passed away on November 26, 2023.
Following her passing, Digitalda’s family reached out to our studio to create an animated video clip for her single DEH PON DI LOW. We were deeply honored to contribute to her legacy by developing as well the visual identity and vinyl design for the release event, which celebrated both the video and her final compositions.
This video clip is a way to keep Digitalda’s work alive beyond her passing and to celebrate her memory. Rather than focusing on the song’s lyrics, the intention is to highlight what she represented: a strong woman who sang and DJ in a male-dominated musical world. To honor this, we created a dreamlike universe filled with nods to sound system culture, the colors she loved, references to her visual art practice, and her quirky obsessions with fried food and chip stands.
Over the course of approximately three minutes, the visual spectacle takes you on a dreamlike journey, featuring a rolling sound system gracefully driven by Digitalda as it moves through a vibrant and ever-changing environment. The video timeline is divided into three worlds—morning, evening, and night—showing the artist traveling on a sound system that evolves into three types of vehicles throughout the day: starting as a Floating Sound System, then transforming into a Rolling Sound System, and finally becoming a Flying Sound System that ascends into the sky, symbolizing the artist’s passing.
Creative process
After writing the story we build the storyboard according to the music cues.
The early stages of the creative process involved extensive planning and rough sketching on paper.
The rough concept below visualizes the transition and atmosphere of the three distinct worlds developed for the video: morning, evening, and night.
Each final animation was preceded by a rough pass created in Adobe Animate to establish timing and motion.
Below is the final animation pass of all elements from the morning world, completed in Adobe Animate and prepared for compositing in Adobe After Effects
Each element was exported using intense, high-contrast placeholder colors. Similar to a "clown pass", it made it easier to apply their final gradient and characteristic colors during the compositing phase in After Effects.
Here, we have the final animation pass of every elements from the evening and the night.
Another example of high contrasted color on the left, becoming composited on the right, with purple night colors in After Effects.
Still images from the videoclip.
