Hayley Williams laments the ominous news cycle, in Mike Kluge & Matthew DeLisi's new promo for Paramore. The horror-tinged promo for The News sees Williams as a dead-eyed spectator, engrossed in the televised battlefield of media manipulation.The deep red textures and surreal styling amplify the artifice of what we see on our screens, and the use of motion control rigs and haunting visual effects creates a nightmarish world from which there is no escape.

Directing duo rubberband. have created a mesmerising film for the return of Steve Lacy, using minimalism to draw the viewer into their distinctive take on the horror genre.As the camera does a 360-degree pan within a fenced-off area in a factory setting, Lacey comes in and out of shot to perform the Latin-flavoured Mercury. This motion control-driven device to frame the performance is the core of the video, but then rubberband. begin to disrupt our expectations.Halfway through the piece, an animal briefly appears walking outside the fence. The tone has now unexpectedly shifted, and the viewer is suddenly aware of a likely interaction between this creature and Lacy. Tension begins to crank up - confirmed by a flash of fur in front of the camera shortly afterwards. From then on Lacy is as much off screen as on-screen, and when he appears, his clothes are increasingly shredded.Shot by award winning cinematographer Evan Profosky on 35mm film, the video takes far less than its brief two minute and 30 second runtime to create a sense of sinister foreboding and creeping horror. The concept works to apply the classic horror formula, that what you (mostly) cannot see is more terrifying. It also captures the increasingly hard-edged energy of Mercury, the first of highly anticipated new material from Lacy.

Edoard Le Scouarnec interprets Chalie Winston's pop-critique of technology's impact on human behaviour as a spiral of tech-chaos, in his imaginative video for Algorithm.As Winston sings 'I'll be your algorithm', a serene domestic scene between the singer and the female lead moving through a series of rotations, each one becoming more glitchy and broken. Winston's figure duplicates becoming a separate entity within this world, which repeats the same routine, and camera motion, with elements increasingly like a video game. Winston becomes omnipresent, but ignored by his partner. This increasingly busy setting is beset with disfunction.Le Scouarnec orchestrates the complicated choreography of the piece using motion control camera moves and elements of animation and VFX, to bring Winston's performance and the concept together with great skill."The idea here [was] to have Charlie incarnating the algorithm - so his girlfriend is in a relationship with the algorithm," says Le Scouarnec. "I [did not] want to show any visual material linked to social media. To me the interesting angle was to show the negative of the algorithm through the prism of the couple."Her man seems to forsee her needs. But slowly it seems not that natural. He starts to blink subtly. I also want[ed] to show that the algorithm always gives us what we want, [but] it can lead to monotony and loss of bearings."So the ideal life goes on... It is more and more monotone. Everyday life scenes are repeated. Charlie becomes more and more present. He duplicates himself in the shots. Until he takes more and more space. We can see the actors in the background performing the same dinner scene several times. They speak less and less..."Charlie is a witness of his own life scenes. Objects begin to flash, the frame is more and more saturated by the multiplicity of the scenes of the couple. Until the break of the song. In a glitch, everything disappears and is transposed to a full 3D universe where many Charlies are floating in the sky. We come back to reality when the woman is getting her head out of her phone."

Harry Law pays homage to classic performance videos in his promo for 5 Seconds Of Summer. Drawing inspiration from pop rock videos of the 90’s and early 00’s - from artists such as Oasis, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and The All-American Rejects - the video for Me, Myself & I takes place in a dimly lit warehouse, with a motion control camera seamlessly cutting around the different personalities of each band member. The video forms a part of the Australian pop outfit's new vision, which is being conceptualised with a number of other creatives across the board, including creative director Tyler Serebreni.“Me Myself & I has such an iconic energy to it, getting to capture that feeling visually while the band was on a global world tour was so incredible, it gave us so much to play with," says Serebreni. "We wanted to put a twist on a performance video, focusing on technology while keeping the aesthetic and inspiration of so many iconic early 2000s performance videos, but still grounded and in line with our album campaign."Harry [Law] helped us bring this vision to life perfectly, complex in its simplicity, highlighting the individuality and style of the guys."

KC Locke takes his motion-control ambitions to the next level, in the dreamy promo for Lola Young's So Sorry. In a conventional greasy spoon caff - the ominously-named Cruel Cafe - we find Lola Young playing a variety of different characters, on both sides of the counter, in an interweaving tapestry of narratives and slick camera moves. Technically advanced and head-spinningly complex, the video is anchored by the artist's down to earth performance style and authentic interpretation of each character she inhabits. It's another innovative promo for KC Locke and team, whose collaboration with Manchester-based G6 Moco has taken things up a notch once again."After experimenting with motion control in 2021 across various projects I had been waiting for the opportunity to use motion control with a full track system," explains Locke. "We designed this concept with that in mind and wanted to create a video which allowed our camera to move around a set freely while telling a visual story."I've wanted to work with Lola Young for a while now and this was the perfect project to link up on. Lola was a pleasure to create with and I feel like we made something great here. The song So Sorry had this feeling of different personalities [so] after pitching the concept of multiple Lolas in her own End Of The F*cking World-style cafe, we got to work on bringing this to life."Between Christmas and New Year's Eve when traveling to Thailand for our holiday, myself and Jenny O’Sullivan (production designer) spent many hours planning and discussing the creative and building a world for Lola. While I spent hours planning out each and every second of the motion control moments, Jenny spent equal time designing Cruel Cafe from the ground up while working remote with her art and set building teams."Once I had the whole video mapped out on paper, Andy Rider (G6 MOCO) then began to pre-vis the entire video for us. G6 MOCO’s dedication and attention to detail really helped in this process of really understanding what I had envisioned."The set construction came together beautifully along with the lighting direction by Stefan Yap (DOP) and Nick Platt (gaffer and Drop City owner) - the set really felt like a real cafe and gave the perfect backdrop for Lola to bring these characters to life."

It's eleven years since Sam Brown's first video for Adele. Finally, we have his second, and it was worth the wait.It was Brown's iconic video for Rolling In The Deep that kickstarted Adele's ascent to superstardom, of course. Now for Oh My God he has supercharged the elements that made that video a slow-burning masterpiece.Once again, a performance by Adele - now mature, so much more self-confident - is framed within a series of vignettes that represent the elements of the song. But this time these individual parts of the vision are brought together, all appearing within a single extraordinary camera movement.With the beautifully choreographed flow of characters and objects, the repetition of individuals on screen - primarily Adele herself - Brown has employed motion control camerawork at a level of sophistication and complexity that has been rarely achieved.But if this video is driven by it's concept, it never loses sight of the primary purpose - display the star quality of Adele. This is a stunning, virtuoso combination of artist performance with filmmaking skill and invention.