Mckenna Grace gave her Sunrise on the Reaping song its visual counterpart on Friday, releasing the official Half Alive music video on her artist channel the same morning the album arrived, and it passed 37,000 views within its first few hours.
The four-minute video tells its story in two staged worlds. In one, Grace sits among roses, dahlias and lit candles in a pale yellow tiered gown, a cellist and a violinist at her sides and a fawn wandering through the foreground. In the other, she performs in black, long gloves on her arms, in front of giant screens showing the flower-covered arena and its Cornucopia, with a hovercraft crossing a night sky above her.
There are no clips from the film itself. The staging does the work instead, moving her from the portrait calm of a tribute presentation to the arena floor, and the video closes with her kneeling in black before a wall of fire, the two musicians flanking her. Grace wrote the song with Debbii Dawson, who produced it with Sam de Jong, and its hook carries the whole arc in one line: “Promise you’ll hold me when I’m half alive.”
Half Alive is track 16 on The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping (The Album), the 29-song collection that arrived Friday. The song’s official audio release landed overnight ahead of the video, and the full album is broken down track by track in our release day rundown. The album is streaming now through the official soundtrack site, and the film reaches theaters Friday, November 20, with Grace as Maysilee Donner.