The Smashing Pumpkins

Episode 1 ("The Colour Of Love") is our first look into this world The Smashing Pumpkins have created, establishing a bridge between objective and subjective. It’s like an impressionistic painting. The creative choices are intentional, but their meanings are more personal. There’s a roughness, a toothiness, to the environment’s style. It’s retro meets futuristic, but the feeling is now. There’s a definite mood that lives somewhere between the world we know and a lucid dreamscape.

To convey the intensity of emotion that seethes through these five interlinked tracks, our team utilized a vivid color palette. As the narrative pivots from internal conflict to external survival, the animation and color convey the characters' struggles and shifting emotions.

We typically didn’t hear the song before beginning production on a particular episode. Billy and his team would send us the script and his overall vision for the episode, from which we would break down into beats and begin creating storyboards. We applied those beats back to the music once we received it. Since this music acted more as a score than a direct sync to the animation, this created a comfortable pace for the narrative.

“I used Gravity Sketch on the Oculus Quest to block out environments in 3D and then set up cameras based on the storyboard. This helped the animators understand what the perspective was and where the ground plane was. That was kind of our bridge between animation and backgrounds. Once the environment is set up in 3D, you can set the camera anywhere and go, ‘Oh, you need reference for this shot, boom, done.’” – Deep Sky’s Creative Director Barret Thomson