In 2014, French directors and animators Thibaud Clergue, Aurélien Duhayon, Sébastien Iglesias and Camille Perrin formed visual supergroup BRVTVS. Their first film was the biker gang tale Horde, and was released to universal fanfare due to its mix of 3D realism and two-dimensional graphic novel style.

Following Horde, musician and filmmaker Pilotpriest, aka Anthony Scott Burns, approached BRVTVS about making a film for brooding single “The Last Goodbye.” Burns, who is working on a sci-fi feature film entitled Alpha, produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B studio, understandably offered the collective full creative control.

“’The Last Goodbye’ is inspired by the black and white movies of Fritz Lang and other German expressionists,” according to BRVTVS, who also cite the Cassini Mission by NASA as an inspiration, which hints at a forthcoming animated virtual reality (VR) project. “We wanted to focus on the drama, the feeling of the loss of a loved one, so we decided to get away from the common imagery of science fiction, which is usually full of colors to make something more intimate. We find it exciting to work with new media, with new rules, and for the moment there are not many VR films with a real story. We'd be proud to be the first ones to try this.”