The promo follows a young boy in his family home alone, as he takes on adult tasks with a childlike sense of innocence, accompanied by moments of both amusement and sadness.
As the promo develops, the boy gets increasingly frustrated with his loneliness, and the realisation dawns that he has seemingly been abandoned for some time. The film ends with him finding release as he dances and throws his body around the house, clutching onto his mother’s red dress, revealing his desire and need to feel close to her.
Mill Colourist Oisin O'Driscoll explains; 'This was my first time working with Director Stroma Cairns, and it was an absolute pleasure. Her brief was to make the grade quite dark and grimy. We started to explore this look in the bathroom scene which has a beautiful mix of warmth and grime. This started to give us the bones of the look, warm natural skin tones with a saturated cyan cast and a hint of green and yellow in the shadows to make it more grimy. This then hinted towards the later developed grades of the living room which have less cyan but still hold the green and yellow shadow and are quite dark.
We played around a lot with the narrative of the video, changing the time of day of shots especially the kitchen and dining scene. Both of these scenes were shot with bright light but we found it worked for the story better to have this set during the evening. We also played with this for the second bathroom scene, warming it up more than the first scene to make it feel like another day and to express some of the character’s inner joy.
We also experimented with grain. I chose to use a specially designed 35mm grain that emulates the grain of a 64D stock. I then blended this into the image, weighting it more with the natural highlights to give it an organic feel.'