Before It’s Gone

Everybody hums. A tune arrives on the stairs or on the bus and is gone before you find your phone. Creative apps are sold as power, pro screens and four hundred instruments, but the person humming on the stairs isn’t short of features. They are short of time. Motif’s job is to catch an idea before it goes.

You can see the melody.

The hummed four-note phrase is drawn as a yellow piano-roll line, in sync with the audio, along real edges in each shot: a bannister, a trolleybus wire, a rain streak, a roofline. Each new instrument enters as a new line in the frame you hear it, until the four lines braid along the horizon and the phrase becomes the logo.

A bright, overcast Genoa of slate roofs, wires and striped stone, art-directed as 35 mm colour negative and desaturated so four graphic colours own the frame. The melody is stored once as note data and laid along a hand-authored path in every plate, so the picture is literally driven by the score. Cuts land every bar or half-bar at 120 BPM; the 9:16 version is the native one, and a 15-second cut-down works as a standalone Reel.