Peakflow Studios | Creative Studio | Brighton Video, Sound, and Web Design

The creative hurdle with this score was immediate: the filmmakers had edited their entire cut to a temporary placeholder track. When a timeline is built around a specific piece of music for weeks, replacing that familiar energy is incredibly difficult. My brief was to capture the tempo, pulse, and underlying vibe they had grown attached to, while delivering a completely original composition.

To achieve this, I locked into the exact tempo of the original edit and built a hypnotic backbone: a minimal, raw, chugging electronic beat that mirrors the constant movement of the road. To lean into a late-1970s electronics feel, I used the soft analogue hiss of a Roland CR-78 drum machine’s high-hat circuit to drive the track forward. At specific breakout moments, I also sampled mechanical indicator clicks, weaving real automotive textures into the spaces in the rhythm.

Once that structural foundation was solid, I stepped away from the reference track entirely to let the music find its own space. Instead of a linear progression, I introduced a shift in the centre of the film.

The electronic pulse drops back to make way for an organic, orchestral string arrangement. Rather than building a massive swell, I kept the strings understated and slightly melancholic, mirroring the bleak overhead landscapes before dropping back into the driving electronic rhythm.

The project is currently in the final stages of post-production, with the visual edit being fine-tuned directly to the pacing and atmosphere of the finished score. I expect to share the locked film here on the website in the coming weeks.

Here is how we navigated client collaboration, complex technical hurdles, and the unexpected choices that defined the final cut.

The Ethical Pivot: Historical Extraction and Silhouetted Heads

The initial concept frames featured relatively clear human features. Once the general layout and beats of the video were established, Olugbenga raised an essential critique around the visible faces. The track’s core themes explore colonialism and religious imperialism, specifically the narrative that European intervention saved the population, which ultimately fostered a sense of shame toward indigenous heritage.

Compounding this theme of historical extraction with modern generative processes felt deeply conflicting. When prompting a model for Nigerian people in Lagos, it generates faces by drawing on web-scraped data of real Nigerian citizens, almost certainly without their knowledge or consent. Using photorealistic generations felt like a modern, digital echo of that same extractive history. The solution needed to do more than solve a visual problem; it needed to honour the intent behind the track.

The main hurdle was preserving the motion and specific atmosphere already built into the timeline, as generating entirely new clips with the exact movement required would have meant starting from scratch. Standard approaches to obscuring the features, including blurring and overlaid dust effects, didn’t hold the right tone.

The solution was a block-silhouette approach using SwitchX, a video-to-video style-transfer tool. Reference frames were built by prompting silhouettes in Nano Banana, then manually adjusted in Affinity to produce clean seed images. Depending on the clip and lighting, the heads were styled as either solid black or solid white. SwitchX then tracked these reference seeds across each sequence, retaining the motion of the original footage throughout.

Overcoming the Train Platform: The Reverse Workflow

One of the most technically demanding sequences was set on a train platform, where characters stand facing away from the camera as a fast train cuts across the foreground. While the train is still crossing, the characters begin turning their heads to follow it, and this pattern of reveal made a standard style-transfer approach unworkable.

Using a standard forward style-transfer workflow proved impossible due to the way the elements are revealed:

• The Style Transfer Constraint: The tool requires all target heads to be fully visible in the very first frame of any processed clip.
• The Obstruction Problem: Because the train crosses progressively, it reveals each character’s turned head one by one as the carriages pass.
• The Jump Shot Fail: Waiting until the train had fully cleared before pulling a reference frame meant the initial moments of the faces appearing would play normally, creating a jarring snap when the silhouette effect suddenly landed on everyone at once.

To solve this, we inverted the temporal logic entirely:

1. The Reversed Starting Point: We took the very last frame of the forward clip, where the train was completely clear and every face fully turned, and manually silhouetted the heads.
2. The Backward Render: The clip was reversed and uploaded to SwitchX using that modified final frame as the new starting point. The tool tracked the silhouettes backward through the sequence as the train reversed into shot.
3. The Final Stitch: Back in DaVinci Resolve, the reversed clip was flipped to forward playback and cut cleanly to the preceding shot of the characters with their backs to the camera.

Because the train moves at such speed, the cut at the moment of maximum obstruction is seamless, transitioning from the un-silhouetted backs of their heads directly into the silhouetted reveal.

Cinematic Scale: Nano Banana and 21:9 Outpainting

The shift to an ultra-wide 21:9 aspect ratio was a pure stylistic choice, as the proportions frame the Lagos landscape in a way that feels expansive and deliberately cinematic. Midjourney was useful for early conceptual tests but couldn’t deliver the precision we needed for the final plates. We moved to Nano Banana, which offered far greater control over the specific stylised look we were after.

For the lateral walking sequence early in the film, we needed a continuous retro Lagos streetscape that could scroll behind the subjects without repeating. To build this without visible seams:

1. Canvas Extension: An architectural plate of Lagos buildings was brought into Affinity, aligned to the far edge of a wide canvas with the remaining space left white.
2. Outpainting: The canvas was exported as a PNG and extended through Nano Banana, maintaining complete stylistic continuity across the join.
3. Parallax Keyframing: In DaVinci Resolve, the two elements were aligned at their X-axis boundary and keyframed to scroll horizontally at a deliberately rapid, unnatural pace, generating a heightened parallax effect behind the walking figures.

Cosmic Motifs and Environmental Contrast

The celestial body recurring throughout the film was lifted directly from a large-scale acrylic painting by fine artist and Peakflow collaborator Katherine Griffin. That hand-painted texture, composited directly into the black void, adds a distinct tactile element to the digital landscape.

Against that black background, the film shifts away from a flat graphic layout into something resembling a physical stage. The retro Lagos streetscape acts like a theatrical vault, letting the viewer look down into a surreal, fragmented space of memory and erasure.

The grade pushes warm ambers and dusty yellows through the city sequences, held against deep teals in the water shots, creating a deliberate contrast that pulls the two environments apart. We shaped the overall colour palette inside Magic Bullet Looks, then used Red Giant Universe to layer on a vintage film texture. It completely takes the edge off the raw digital generations, locking all the elements into a cohesive, cinematic world.

From Serene Waves to Disaster Movie

The pure black skies that dominate the film was not the initial plan. Originally, we built complex sky replacements using Ankara fabric patterns keyframed across the background. Those textile layers carried real Afro-surrealist weight and were never the wrong idea, just not ultimately the right one.

During one editing session, the background tracks were temporarily disabled while reviewing the foreground composites, and the subjects sat against a complete void. The decision to keep them there was almost immediate.

Against that black, the film stopped being a graphic collage and became something closer to a physical stage. The retro Lagos streetscape compresses into a closed vault of history. The viewer looks down into it from an elevated remove, while larger-than-life elements loom over the environment rather than sitting within it: Katherine’s hand-painted Venus, and the artist’s own face performing the lip-sync directly into the sky at enormous scale.

This staging carries through to the final sequence, where the composition opens completely. The film ends quietly with waves breaking against an empty backdrop before a vast wall of water begins advancing on the city. For the wide shot looking across the rooftop architecture toward the lagoon, the movement was built from a static generation, manually keyframed on the Y-axis in DaVinci Resolve to build a slow, controlled pull-out.

The widescreen format pays off in the final third of the video, where the visual scale shifts entirely. The scene begins quietly, with waves breaking against the black void. As the track kicks back in, a massive wall of water overtakes the city. For this specific wide-angle shot, taken from a rooftop vantage point looking across the cityscape towards the lagoon in the background, Katherine's hand-painted Venus hangs suspended above the chaos.

To build the drama and give the environment a genuine sense of scale, we started with a static generation of the city and manually keyframed the scale and Y-axis in the timeline to create a slow, expanding pull-out. As with almost every shot in the project, building the scene manually from isolated video layers rather than relying on a single generated clip kept the distinct, DIY collage aesthetic intact while adding physical depth to the frame.

Working from isolated layers rather than treating any generation as a finished output is how this sequence, and almost every other shot in the film, was built. It is slower and more fragile, but it is why the composite holds physical weight, and why the film reads as something made rather than rendered.

The Fountain and the full EP, Embrace The Dawn, are scheduled for release this summer.

After a tough selection process, we are thrilled to announce the results.

Congratulations to Emma Chow Atelier.

We were captivated by her work in regenerative design, creating ethical botanical art from materials like dead-stock silk and dyes made from fallen flowers gathered in East Sussex. Her process feels both timeless and deeply innovative, and embodies the kind of creative energy we are passionate about amplifying.

She has been selected to receive a bespoke promotional video, crafted by Peakflow Studios.

Explore her work: Website | Instagram

Community Spotlight

We also wanted to use our platform to amplify some of the other entrants whose missions and quality of work stood out to us:

• A Sparkle in Time: Transformational coaching.
• blkdiamondance: A Brighton-based dance company focused on building confidence.
• CeCe & Me: A mobile shoe fitting service for children.
• Emaze Inner Health: A retailer of health supplements with a focus on transparency.
• Flex Yoga: A welcoming yoga and wellness studio based in Monton.
• Inroads: A writer-led company creating site-specific theatre inspired by local community stories.
• Mind Nature Studio: An innovative practice using nature-based training to support mental wellbeing.
• Nam Yang Brighton: A charitable martial arts club with a strong community outreach programme.
• Olivia McMaster: Life and transformational coaching for women.
• Prima Cotton: An ethical retailer of organic cotton clothing for babies.
• Scarlet Destiny: A design brand championing sustainable, slow fashion.
• Six Transformational Coaching: Coaching services to empower personal and professional growth.
• Sonic Sidekick: An AI-powered service providing feedback and support for music production.
• Steeev: A social enterprise with a mission to tackle male loneliness.
• Steve Baker Sound: A Brighton-based music producer helping artists transform song ideas into finished tracks.
• The Puzzling World of Professor Kettlestring: An interactive, illusion-based tourist attraction in York.

A sincere thank you to everyone featured. We are energised by the connections made through this process and look forward to the potential collaborations to come.

All the best,

Solomon
Founder, Peakflow Studios

To match this feeling of deep introspection, we wanted to create a visual world that feels like a subconscious state. Immersive rather than linear, like stepping inside a vivid, textured memory.

To achieve this, we are employing three key stages:

1. Collage & Surrealism: Using Midjourney as a starting point, we are generating imagery that blends photorealism with surreal, collage-like elements. The goal is to treat the frame like a moving scrapbook, layering different textures and figures to create scenes that feel constructed from the past.
2. 2.5D Motion: We are then taking these layered compositions and creating depth and parallax motion using AI video generators such as Veo 3.1, mimicking how memories surface and shift. Sometimes drifting slowly, other times abruptly, giving the scenes a dream-like dimensionality.
3. Vintage Aesthetic: To help ground the visuals in the 90s, we are drawing on an Old Nollywood aesthetic: the distinctive lo-fi texture of Nigerian cinema from that era. By applying heavy analogue-style treatment in post-production (layering film grain, scan lines, and chromatic aberration), the footage takes on the texture of the VHS tapes that defined that period.

Here’s a short clip from the music video demonstrating these techniques in motion:

Below are some stills from early motion tests demonstrating the collage style and textural effects:

The track’s theme of an individual navigating a hyper-digital, often isolating landscape is a powerful starting point. We’re exploring concepts that blend portraiture with vast, technologically dense environments to capture this feeling of introspection amidst overwhelming information.

Here’s a look at some of the early visual concepts and mood board explorations.