The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2021
Skrillex's Butterflies video turns lockdown frustration into visual art
Skrillex's Butterflies renders a pandemic year as visual art, channelling lockdown frustration into a video that builds to a transcendent climax.
Skrillex
What it had to solve
By 2021, successive lockdowns had curtailed young people's relationships and opportunities, and the pandemic's toll on an entire generation needed an artistic response. The video for Butterflies set out to give that frustration a form people could watch and feel resolved by.
How it works
Skrillex's Butterflies music video was made against a specific backdrop: successive lockdowns had curtailed young people's relationships and opportunities, and the pandemic had impacted an entire generation. The video did not ignore that year or escape it — it rendered it.
The result is an impressionistic portrait rather than a narrative: the video channels the frustrations of lockdown youth into a contemporary work of visual art, with imagery that builds from confinement to a transcendent climax, so watching it plays as release.
The concept gives the song a function beyond entertainment — a few minutes in which a generation's pent-up feeling is seen, shaped and resolved — and earned the work a place in D&AD's awards archive under Visual Effects for music videos.
Why it lands
- It named the experience instead of dodging it: relationships and opportunities curtailed by lockdowns were the video's subject, so the audience met their own year on screen.
- Impressionistic form let the emotion stay universal — not one story or one political read, but a feeling everyone in lockdown shared.
- The arc from frustration to a transcendent climax gave the piece a job: it plays as catharsis rather than complaint.
- The visual-effects craft behind the piece let a music video register as contemporary art, which is how it reached an awards archive.
What it did
The video turned a shared, difficult year into something watchable as art, giving its audience catharsis rather than commentary, and entered D&AD's awards archive under Visual Effects as an example of a music video carrying a generation's frustration to a resolved close.
What you can take
When an audience shares one overwhelming experience, give the feeling a form: art that lets people watch their own frustration resolve reaches further than a message telling them how to feel.
Since then
Butterflies remains in D&AD's awards archive under Visual Effects, filed among music-video work from the pandemic era. The archive entry records no view counts or chart figures; the idea preserved is the choice to make a video that gives a generation's frustration a form and then resolves it, treating the music video as visual art about its own moment rather than an escape from it.
Sources
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