Sim-Like Creatures Come to Life in Ellie Goulding's Mysterious New Video

Partizan director Sophia Ray takes the helm for Ellie Goulding's latest video 'Easy Lover'.

The concept of the video is based around these mysterious sim-like creatures, called 'Skins'. These Skins are controllable game-like characters - that live out bizarre 'realistic' lives in what appears to be a 'real' world. How and what is controlling them, however, remains unclear. The more the audience watches, the more we see the world and these Skins start to glitch and malfunction, giving the impression of a synthetic wider world where nothing is quite as it seems. 

Sophia Ray shares more about the project, “It was inspiring to get the initial brief from Nathan Klein (Ellie's creative director) for this video, as he really mapped out the creative mood he wanted to take this new era for Ellie in, and gave me a lot of visual references to latch on to.”

“A lot of our film and fashion references aligned so I was really keen to take all the cues in Nathan's visual brief and come up with a concept that tied them all together.”

“From the get-go Nathan and I wanted the concept to have some ambiguity. We wanted to create a strange, oddball, editorial world that links other aspects of the campaign together and still holds a mysterious mood. It was an awesome process working with Nathan and having someone creative to bounce ideas together with, also working with someone where there was great synergy and trust throughout made the shoot days and post such an enjoyable process.”

“Ellie wanted to play a few of the skin characters in this world where she could have a bit of fun with her styling and characterisation, it was so cool to work with Ellie and see these playful sides of her come out as she got into character. It was such a fun three-day shoot, as we travelled all over Sofia Bulgaria shooting in crazy locations and finishing on a more chilled studio build day where we shot our game cube 'dollhouse' set up.”

“Massive thanks to the production team and Partizan, Mayling and Ayo for making the process so seamless and fun, Katie Dolan who trusted us implicitly and supported us along the way and also the amazing Four Elements service team in Bulgaria.”