SWAN SONG

THE BRIEF

Benjamin Cleary's Swan Song presented one of the most integrated and demanding AR design briefs Territory had encountered: not individual screens or interfaces in a specific scene, but an entire AR-based technology infrastructure that had to function coherently across the whole film. In Cleary's near-future world, the black mirrors of mobile and stationary screens have been replaced by AR displayed through contact lenses, gesture-controlled and personal to each user. Territory was engaged early during the pandemic lockdown before production to collaborate on the design and world-building before a single frame was shot.

The central creative challenge was tonal as much as technical. Swan Song is not a film about technology. It is a film about identity, love and what it means to be replaced by a version of yourself. The technology had to be beautiful and seamlessly integrated, present enough to establish the world, recessive enough never to distract from the emotional story at the film's centre.

THE CREATIVE APPROACH

We designed the full range of AR interface types that feature throughout Swan Song: personal UIs, home office AR, AR home gaming, speculative hardware, smartwatch UIs and virtual communication interfaces. Mobile AR navigation is gesture-based, summoned and controlled via hand movements and finger gestures, displayed through contact lenses rather than any held device. The visual language throughout is strikingly clean, cold and minimalist, calibrated to feel like a natural evolution of the design sensibilities already visible in contemporary technology, closer to what already exists than to conventional science fiction speculation.

The protagonist Cameron's personal UI carries his specific creative identity, a product packaging designer and sketch artist whose interfaces feel designed rather than simply functional. This character-specific approach required Territory to develop a system flexible enough to vary by user while remaining visually coherent as a world.

The stylistic precision required that Territory remain careful throughout about the relationship between UI and narrative: technology could be protagonist or passive presence depending on the scene, and the design had to serve both registers without visual inconsistency.

THE OUTCOME

Swan Song was released on Apple TV+ in December 2021 to strong critical reception, praised for its visual beauty, Mahershala Ali's performance and Cleary's sensitive handling of its central ethical questions. Territory's AR interface design was recognised at the 2023 Motion Awards, where the studio won the Film Graphics category, one of two wins at that ceremony. The work has since been noted by observers as anticipating several interaction design patterns that appeared in Apple Vision Pro, which launched two years after the film's release. For Territory, Swan Song represented the studio's most complete world-building engagement with AR as a design medium, building not individual screens but an entire technology ecosystem that had to feel real, personal and emotionally appropriate to the story it was serving.

Director Benjamin Cleary · VFX Producing Supervisor Ajoy Mani · Creative Director Andrew Popplestone · Studio Territory Studio · Client Apple Original Films / Apple TV+ · Award Motion Award — Film Graphics 2023