Dan French has created an underground cyber-world for Chinese-Vietnamese-British rapper Jianbo's collaboration with Nix Northwest - created entirely in CGI.

The video for For The Honour is a gamefied story that spirals through a surreal vignettes exploring honour and Jianbo’s conflicted experience of it, while elements of Asian identity and internal struggles are layered throughout. And with French choosing animation as a means to lock creative freedom, it amounts to an awesome achievement.

Inspired by the cinematic language of Wong Kar Wai, the urban sprawl of Tokyo, and the neon tones of cyberpunk futurism, French blended dystopian motifs with real cultural undercurrents in Jianbo’s life to also comment on loyalty, sacrifice, and the ripple effects of success. And it's effectively handcrafted as the director handled every aspect of the CG animation himself - from modelling and rigging to texturing and compositing.

"Jianbo and I go way back," says French. "I’d been wanting to make something with him for a while and what started as a simple idea quickly evolved into a full CGI underground world."

But with limited resources, he explains that he was pushed to be creative and as well as picking up new skills along the way. Lacking access to motion capture studios or suits, he embraced a DIY approach, recording iPhone footage of Jianbo dancing, then manually translating the movements into animation. He leaned into a stylised aesthetic that nods to GTA and PS2-era graphics rather than striving for photorealism.

"I didn’t realise how much I’d bitten off, learning how to do motion capture, rig people and model faces," he continues. "As it started coming to life, I kept pushing because having total creative freedom was a dream. I wasn’t aiming for photorealism, I actually liked the slightly off, mocap-heavy, gamey vibe - it gave GTA nostalgia. So I wanted it to stay rough around the edges to show that it was handcrafted for real by me.”

The end result is a singular vision: raw and unfiltered. A music video grounded in modern culture that blurs the line between personal story and digital spectacle, designed to live entirely within the world its creators meticulously built by hand.