Favourite Colour: Black - aka Chris Turner - has directed an intense drama for singer-songwriter Jessica Sweetman, featuring Peaky Blinders actor Emmet J Scanlan.For the rousing indie-pop of Rise Up, Jessica is the woman driving Scanlon's character crazy. She's there, then she disappears like a ghost, then appearing although invisible to Scanlan, observing his increasing trauma. She is his obsession until a climactic steamy encounter on a storm-tossed Sussex beach.The brief for Rise Up came in the form of a script already written by Jessica and actor Scanlan, after they met at an awards ceremony and got talking about making a video together. Turner's job was to make this script a reality, given the various issues of time, availability, budget and - of course - the good old British weather."Originally it was meant to end on a beautiful sunset, but even though there were promising glints of sunshine at the start of our first shoot day, the bleak skies soon started to roll in," he explains. "We had to quickly re-think the ending, resulting in a last-minute improvised final shot which eventually became my favourite of the entire film."Shooting the end first meant that we could then alter the earlier part of the story for our second shoot day, creating a moodier, more atmospheric film. Obviously when we were shooting interiors at the end of day two, outside Hastings was enjoying a breathtaking sunset. The type we’d hoped to get the previous evening."But ultimately I prefer the more dramatic, windswept final scene we captured. It goes to show that the most important rule of filmmaking is to be 100% prepared and have everything planned out in minute detail, but also be ready to have to trash all of that and make it up as you go along."The result is a cinematic and emotionally resonant, blending windswept coastal imagery with an intimate, symbolic narrative of struggle and renewal. The evocative visuals to mirror the song’s themes of resilience, vulnerability, and ultimately rising above adversity.

Ramez Silyan's video for South Korean singer Park Hyo Shin is a meditation on modern life, through the journey of a wandering silver balloon. And it's very impressive - a pocket nostalgic epic.From the moment a little girl allows the balloon to fly away during a car journey, we're moving through a series of vignettes with a varied cast of characters in different key life moments - some where Park Hyo Shin is performing the song AE - the drifting silver balloon threading each unique story together.Filmed in Argentina, it's beautifully done. As the silver balloon loses its Park introduces his own smiley face balloon and it builds to a tremendous climax.The cumulative effect, with the soundtrack of this old school sentimental ballad from one of South Korea's old school pop stars, is to generate sheer emotion. So be warned, watch this and you may end up with tears streaming down your face without quite knowing why.

Warren Fu directs a classic mid-century Californian dream with a star-studded cast for the gorgeously retro vocal stylings of Laufey. And it comes with its own deliciously chilling twist. The video for Madwoman features Heated Rivalry's Hudson Williams, alongside Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu, Lola Tung of The Summer I Turned Pretty, and Megan Skiendiel of the girl group KATSEYE.The sun-kissed, vintage aesthetic is the perfect complement to a track in the retro-pop genre that Laufey has made her own. But the perfection of the lives of Laufey and her girlfriends starts to falter and things get darker as Hudson Williams's character reveals his true self. For Laufey it slowly degrades into a Stepford Wives-esque narrative - with some Hotel California vibes thrown in. It's an absorbing concept - Sabrina Carpenter would either approve or be green with envy - wonderfully executed by Fu and team. And in spotlighting mainstream talent across music, film, sports, and the arts, it's proof positive that Asian representation across these mediums is responsible for some of the greatest stories shaping culture today.

A condemned man disrupts his own public execution, denying the crowd the ending they came for, in Alex Takács's gripping 'acid western' for JJerome87 - the new solo project by alt-J's Joe Newman.Set on a barren mesa grassland, the video for Brush Me Like A Horse follows an intriguing and wild narrative where a grotesque event unfolds. As crowds gather with picnic baskets and binoculars, a television host narrating the proceedings with pageant-level bravura, the man whose crime is never disclosed is marched toward his public execution - by a highly original method.A longtime collaborator of Newman’s - as Young Replicant he has made videos for alt-J, the UKMVA-winning video for 3WW and Deadcrush - Takács stages the film as a sun-bleached fever dream, somewhere between a Sergio Leone western and a twisted daytime game show. With the video's semi-desert setting - it was shot in Agua Dulce, Santa Clarita - the inventively cruel instrument of execution, a metal cage that includes a treadmill perched over a yawning cliffdrop, could have been inspired by a contraption from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.But as Takacs racks up the tension in this bizarre scenario, it sharpens into something genuinely unsettling. With no context for the man’s alleged crime, the viewer is left without moral clarity, forced to consider whether any wrongdoing could justify a punishment so extreme. As the pageantry swells around the accused, the question becomes whether he can deny the crowd of consuming the ending they came for.“Brush Me Like a Horse is an acid western about a man condemned to die in a cruel, humiliating public spectacle," says Takács. "Joe Newman came to me with the vivid image of a state execution via treadmill, and it immediately conjured this whole narrative world."In Joe’s songwriting, the images are layered and nested inside one another: a man is accused, the accused is a horse, the horse is a mouse in a field where cats roam. The track already contained multiple voices and characters; it cut so many strong silhouettes that my job was simply to fill them in.”This is quite an introduction to Joe Newman's new project, hugely ambitious in its storytelling. A departure befitting this ne musical direction, but it also fits comfortably into the greater canon of alt-J videos.