Au/Ra gives us E-Motion
A hidden power awakens in a new video from award-winning Fight Gravity director Andy Mihov.
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Fresh off Best Production Company at the 2026 London Music Video Awards, director Andy Mihov and Fight Gravity return to Au/Ra's world for the closing chapter of her debut album heartcore.
Director Mihov reunites with Au/Ra for E-Motion, the final video of the artist's debut concept album heartcore, produced by Fight Gravity. A dark fantasy performance piece, it places Au/Ra inside a long-forgotten biostasis chamber in a deep underground chamber, which has become overgrown with vines, moss and flowers. There a hidden power inside the artist begins to stir and awaken.
"A lot of my work starts from trying to turn the emotion or subtext of the lyrics or brief, into a physical space or state," says Mihov. "With E-Motion, that state was awakening: something dormant, buried or trapped beginning to come back to life." Early conversations around the track circled solarpunk, sending Mihov back to the films that shaped him during his childhood years: Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. heartcore is described as a conceptual, dungeon-crawler-style journey through Au/Ra’s psyche, with E-Motion sitting at the end of that journey, the director says it "had to feel like one chapter within that larger story."
The set itself was conceptualiSed and built quickly. "We custom-built the biostasis chamber and brought in a van full of soil and plants," says Mihov. "We debated doing this entirely in VFX but I wanted her to feel like she was inside a real environment. Huge thanks goes to the production design geniuses that are Fingal Green and Tilda Bonham-Carter who made this possible." VFX was reserved for the chrysalis states, the screen interface and the butterfly. "If the whole thing became purely digital, it would have lost the very thing the track is reaching for: life."
Shaping the darkness fell to DOP Arran Green "a true master of light," says Mihov, who "especially excels at 'dark beauty,' which is a personal fascination of mine." The chamber "needed darkness. So we treated light as something selective, whose absence was just as important as its presence."
Credits
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- Production Company Fight Gravity Films
- Director Andy Mihov
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Credits
View on- Production Company Fight Gravity Films
- Director Andy Mihov
- Production Designer Fingal Green
- Production Designer Tilda Bonham Carter
- Executive Producer Paul Cheung
- DP Arran Green / (DP)
Explore full credits, grab hi-res stills and more on shots Vault
Credits
powered by- Production Company Fight Gravity Films
- Director Andy Mihov
- Production Designer Fingal Green
- Production Designer Tilda Bonham Carter
- Executive Producer Paul Cheung
- DP Arran Green / (DP)
The film builds to a striking metamorphosis, and it was the hardest thing in it. "We shot Au/Ra backlit on a transparent plinth, keeping the performance very simple, then roto’ed her out and built the inner world around her," the director explains. "On set, all you would see is the artist lying on a plinth and then standing on tiptoe with a wind machine blasting in her face. The butterfly imagery was a metaphor for transformation, but the real idea was something latent in her finally becoming visible."
E-Motion is Mihov’s second film with Au/Ra, following the highly praised Crack!, which just earned Fight Gravity Best Production Company at the 2026 London Music Video Awards. "Working with Au/Ra has been one of the most rewarding collaborations I've had," shares Mihov. "We come from the same world and spoke the same language where references were concerned. We love similar anime, games and concepts. At times we’d lose track of what we were doing because we were just vibing and having a nice chat!" The award, he adds, "rewards the whole team, not just the individual, and honours the effort of pulling together a complex vision with limited resources."
That support is what made the ambition possible. "Paul Cheung (Executive Producer) and Mateo (Producer) gave me the support to make something that felt much bigger than the resources suggested," says the director. "That's the real value of a good production company: not just making the shoot happen, but helping the idea survive contact with reality."
"What Andy, Mateo and the rest of the team did for our second outing with Au/ra was truly sensational," says Cheung. "The team had less than a week to pull everything together from sign-off to the shoot - and considering the ambition of the set and the subsequent VFX, it’s staggering how they pulled it off. It’s clear that Andy and Au/ra have been able to develop an impressive shorthand from the Crack! video - which meant they could just fly through the scenes in double quick time. I cannot wait to see what the next collaboration between Au/ra, Andy and Fight Gravity will look like!"
