The latest music video from director Jake Oleson continues his bold exploration of radiance field technology in storytelling and it's one of his most emotionally intense projects to date.
Oleson is no stranger to radiance field representations like NeRFs (Neural Radiance Fields), having spent significant time pushing the medium’s boundaries across music videos and experimental films. His 2023 short film Given Again, made up of hundreds of NeRFs, won second place at RunwayML’s AI Film Festival and helped cement his reputation as a leading voice in AI-powered cinema.
He also was a prominent figure on Zayn Malik’s 2023 music video, Love Like This, which featured numerous NeRFs and racked up over 10 million views within its first 24 hours. But the one that stands out most to me is Oleson’s collaboration with RL Grime on Pour Your Heart Out, a hauntingly beautiful visual narrative constructed from over 700 individual NeRFs. A few years later, a second music video emerged from the same project for RL Grime’s track Borderline, expanding the story even further.
Unlike Pour Your Heart Out, which felt dreamlike and meditative, Borderline is raw and frenetic, pushing the emotional tension to its breaking point. When Oleson first heard the track, he was struck by its sharp, distorted interruptions. To him, it sounded like reality itself was tearing open. Rather than approach it as a traditional breakup video, he leaned into the chaos, imagining a relationship locked in a looping emotional spiral, like a soap opera in freefall.
That vision translated into a bold creative choice: diving headfirst into a fractured visual space where physical environments mirror emotional breakdowns. Oleson experimented with motion capture and volumetric performance, using radiance fields to blend physical scans with more abstract, glitching elements.
What makes Borderline so compelling is how it uses cutting-edge tools not just for spectacle, but for storytelling.
Watch the music video here! More information about Jake Oleson and his most recent spatial film Currents can be found on his website.
