The video that bent its own frame, and won two cinematography prizes for it
Slit-scan distortion, stretched ratios and extreme close-ups, applied to a track that did not need any help being tense. It took the Golden Frog at Camerimage and then the British Society of Cinematographers award four months later.
Watch on YouTubeTwo cinematography juries gave this the same year, which almost never happens to a music video.
At EnergaCamerimage 2025, "Chains & Whips" took the Golden Frog in the Music Videos Competition, awarded jointly to cinematographer Jake Gabbay and director Gabriel Moses. On 7 February 2026 it took Cinematography In A Music Video at the BSC Awards.
What the image is doing
Promonews described the BSC-winning work as "a technical and aesthetic feat, including the use of 'slit scan' and imaginative use of lipsync". On release they put the effect more usefully:
The video for Chains & Whips unfolds through a stripped-back yet disorienting aesthetic, where each frame subtly distorts, as if reality itself were bending.
Slit-scan is an old technique with a specific behaviour: it builds a single image out of a moving subject sampled through a narrow aperture over time, so movement smears along one axis while everything else stays put. It is what makes the closer framings feel wrong in a way you cannot immediately name.
The full crew, as published
Director Gabriel Moses. Cinematographer Jake Gabbay. Production designer Eliza Chance. Editor Joseph Taylor at Trim Editing. Colourist John Lowe. Visual effects by 1080p. Executive producer Alice Wills, producer Jules de Chateleux. Production company DIVISION, for Roc Nation. Released July 2025.
We found no interview with Moses or Gabbay about this video on any reachable source, so there is no quote here. We would rather leave the gap than fill it with someone else's description of their intentions.
Missing a credit? Tell us who worked on this and we will add them and say that we did.
