- Agency: DAVID NY
- Client: Clash Royale
- Category: Video Design — Animation
- Location: Miami, Florida, United States
- Project Brief: Create an animated video that explores innocence through stylized visuals, emotional pacing, and contrasting tones within a concise narrative.
Clash Royale is a mobile game built on fast, disposable combat. You deploy cards, skeletons swarm, things explode, and you do it again in two minutes.
The animation video "30 Seconds of Innocence" takes that same universe and does something it has no business doing: it makes you feel something for a creature made of felt.
DAVID NY renders the entire spot in needle-felted wool. Every surface (the Golem's armor, the skeleton army's hollow skulls, the castle on the hill) looks stitched and fuzzy, like something pulled from a child's toy box.
That material choice isn't decorative. It's the argument. The second you see a skull that looks huggable, the emotional stakes of what happens to it change entirely.
The story has no dialogue. No voiceover, no text, no explanation.
Just a Golem standing at a bridge with its ward — a smaller, vulnerable creature in its care — when a skeleton horde begins rising on the other side. What follows is a 30-second act of quiet sacrifice.
The Golem spots the danger. It notices a butterfly that has landed on the ward's hand. It releases it, watches the ward run off chasing it, and then turns to face what's coming alone. The ward plays in the warm light while the Golem walks into the blue.
The lighting carries the emotional split with precision. Warm sunrise tones — amber, gold, soft pink — hold every shot with the ward. The skeleton pit runs cool: blue, violet, dim. The Golem moves between both, and when it steps from one palette into the other, you feel the decision it has already made.
The music and the cuts do the rest, building just enough tension that when the ward finally looks back and sees what's happening, the moment lands without a word being spoken. That's the real craft here. DAVID NY's work on "30 seconds of Innocence" earns a genuine emotional beat inside a 30-second ad for a game known for having none.
It works precisely because of the contradiction: the felt texture signals safety and childhood comfort, the story gives that comfort something to protect, and then it costs the protector everything.
A skeleton army made of plush wool is still a skeleton army. The Golem knows that. The ward doesn't yet. And for 30 seconds, that gap is everything.
