Music: French director Hugo Moreno presents an animated urban landscape that blends ancient Mesopotamian and mid-century Modern architecture in this music video for Art Department's track Walls.

Moreno worked with fellow director Grandson & Son and Art Department's Jonny White to create a stylised world that is "somewhere between utopia and dystopia" to accompany the Canadian techno group's electronic track.

The fictional landscape depicted is populated with ancient ziggurat structures built between 4000 BC and 600 BC in Mesopotamia – an area of modern-day Iraq.

Channels of water flow around, through and over the buildings and plazas, where people are seen lounging beside desert-dwelling plants and hovering cars.

The video's protagonist – a man who appears to be struggling to get over flashbacks of the past – lives in a Modernist villa reminiscent of those built in California's desert cities like Palm Springs, by architects including Richard Neutra.

"As well as Mesopotamian architecture, I got inspiration from Richard Neutra's mid-century Modern Californian villas for the main character's house and Florida cityscapes at sunsets for the larger backgrounds," Moreno said.

"But I also looked at a lot of other references like cheap Florida postcards and video games."

The man can't seem to shake violent memories, which flash up in black and white at intervals, and ends up falling into his swimming pool.

"There are different possible interpretations but mine is that a man is haunted by subliminal visions of a woman suffering, maybe abused," said Moreno.

"We can imagine that the man used to be the author of this violence, while he tries to bury his memory."

Once submerged, the man appears to disintegrate into a black cloud that slowly pollutes the rest of the waterways and then billows into the pink sky.

The rest of the colour scheme is limited to purple for the buildings and bright turquoise for the water, adding to the retro-futuristic feel of the clip.

The idea for the music video arose after the production company and co-directors wrote a scenario based upon an illustration Moreno completed a few years ago.

The directors used Adobe Photoshop software to edit the early concepts and final backgrounds, while After Effects was used for compositing and adding water effects to the 2D animation, which was created using Flash.

"I like to give life to the background by animating few details like trees and plants, waterfall and smoke effects," said Moreno.

"The French animation studio Chez Eddy generously offered us a workplace while Grandson & Son and Jonny White were supervising the project from Toronto," Moreno said.

The team spent 14 weeks on the project, which consisted of two weeks of pre-production and three months of production.

Art Department's track Walls was released last month via record label No 19.