S+C+A+R+R's 'Never Give Up' hides a CGI dancer in one unbroken shot (interview)

Focus on the character and their movement, keeping surroundings minimal — just enough to highlight the figure and tell a little story — for an audience curious about new kinds of bodily aesthetics and expression.

Director Jack Antoine Charlot (Passion Paris) worked with choreographer Nicholas Huchard, finding new moves while tracing the camera's path through space; animation studio Kombbo handled post-production, setting the lights in the mirrors and rendering the CGI that turns the dancer into a mystery. (Interview with Charlot published by Communication Arts, 2021.)

The video was selected for Communication Arts' exhibit — third-party recognition of the craft — while leaving the character unexplained to keep questions, and searches, pointed at the band.

The video for S+C+A+R+R's song 'Never Give UP', directed by Jack Antoine Charlot of Passion Paris, was built around a single idea: a character who is a mystery. The audience can feel they are different but cannot tell exactly how — generating questions and an appetite to discover more about the band. The character's design also embodies the diversity and plurality of the people behind the making of the band.

The craft was unusually constrained: the film is mostly CGI yet staged as one continuous sequence shot, which made storyboarding impossible. Choreographer Nicholas Huchard and Charlot developed moves and camera paths together, while animation studio Kombbo handled post-production — 'understanding and setting the lights in the mirrors and how the camera moves in the film'.

In the Communication Arts exhibit Q&A, Charlot's takeaways were process lessons: 'You can do things far beyond your budget range if you communicate well and stay open to a final result that can be different from what you initially had in mind' — retaining the feeling over the Instagrammable still.

The unexplainable body is the hook: ambiguity about what is CGI and what is human makes the clip rewatchable as a puzzle.

A sequence shot forces choreography and camera to be designed as one system, giving the video its seamlessness.

Keeping the surroundings sparse concentrates all attention — and budget — on the character's movement.

Mystery is a design constraint: hide the technique until viewers feel something is off but can't name it, and they replay to find out what they saw.

The video was featured in Communication Arts' exhibit in 2021; Charlot said the lessons fed into the ongoing S+C+A+R+R video collaborations with Kombbo and Huchard.