Oscar Ryan and Ewan Mcintosh direct a high energy, dance-driven promo for rising pop act XO. 

Ushering in a fresh entry to the girlgroup revival of late, the video for Hotline is a feverish showcase of choreography and performance. 

With a retrofuturistic, corporate environment and Y2K-influenced styling, the video takes the best of modern K-Pop and nostalgic Noughties visuals, and gives the whole thing a tighter, cleaner focus.

"The most important thing for us from the beginning was the choreography," say Ryan and McIntosh. "The girls have such a strong energy individually and together, so we wanted the camera language to respect that rather than overpower it. 

"We made a decision quite early on that the camera shouldn’t really move much at all, most of the movement comes through zooms, because we wanted the choreo to fully live in frame and feel super clear and direct. The song is such a bop that it felt wrong to hold anything back visually, so cloning the girls and building these infinite versions of them became a way of maximising the energy of the track. By the final chorus it feels like the whole world starts overflowing with different versions of XO.

"The girls were amazing throughout the shoot and brought such a good energy into the space from the second we started. There’s already a real trust growing between all of us and I think that only gets stronger the more projects you make together.

"We also had to squeeze everything into one day with no pre-light, so the crew absolutely carried this one. From Fyo producing the whole thing to runners staying late with us while we squeezed out the final setups, everybody pushed hard to make the video what we imagined when we first started conversations with the girls, management and label. There are always shots you lose on the day, but this one landed really close to the vision we had from the start.

"There’s also a crazy amount of hidden VFX work throughout the video that Ewan handled. A lot of it isn’t supposed to be noticeable at all, it’s constantly stitching performances together and helping sell the illusion of multiple versions existing in the same space. It was definitely a process but it cleans everything up so seamlessly."