Candy Crush Saga · King · Music Season
Upside Down.
An art exploration for Candy Crush Saga's Music Season with Thundercat and sculptor Dan Lam. Dan poured the physical work. AIM made the film.
01 · The brief
Make candy behave like sound.
Candy Crush Saga's 2025 Music Season is headlined by Thundercat and a new cover of Diana Ross's "Upside Down," released as a playable, match-3 music experience. The art exploration had to carry that idea into the physical world — and back out again in a vertical film built for a feed.
Dan Lam's practice is the obvious and only answer. Her drip sculptures — spiked, gradient, gravity-fed resin blooms — are already candy that refuses to sit still. Put a pour on a turntable and it reads as a note held too long. Group three of them and it reads as a match.
AIM took the studio footage, the pours, the mascot builds and the process plates and cut them into a single 9:16 piece: a tactile loop where the material does the choreography and the game's grammar sits underneath every edit. Fun, bright, hyper-tactile, and never once a product demo.
02 · The cut — 00:20 · vertical
Watch the film.
Tap the film to play with sound
Tap play for sound · 1080×1920 web cut, masters on request.
03 · Material — the pour
Gravity is the animator.
Nothing in the pour sequences is keyframed. The camera sits close, the resin finds its own timing, and the cut waits for it. Every drip in the film is a real drip that happened once.
04 · Grammar
Three of a kind, then it goes.
The edit borrows the game's only rule. Shapes arrive in threes, hold for a beat, and clear. Once the eye learns it in the first five seconds, the rest of the film can be pure texture and the viewer still reads structure.
- Triads
- Sculptures staged in threes — the clear is the cut.
- Saturation
- Candy palette held at full chroma, no filmic desaturation.
- Grid
- Halftone and grid plates surface between pours as scoreboard.
- Broadcast
- CRT and glitch passes close the loop back into the game.
05 · Character and signal
The blob gets a broadcast.
Dan's grinning form is the through-line: poured on, buried, macro'd, starred, glitched, and finally framed inside a wood-cabinet TV — the Music Season signing off on its own channel.
06 · Credits
Who made what.
Physical artwork: Dan Lam. Resin, foam, pigment, spikes — all of it hers.
Film: AIM. Edit, sequence design, motion treatment, finishing.
Music: Thundercat — "Upside Down," after Diana Ross.
Client: King · Candy Crush Saga, 2025 Music Season.