The Doors Celebrate 50th Anniversary of ‘Riders on the Storm’ with Stunning New Film

Legendary rock band The Doors are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their iconic track ‘Riders on the Storm’ with the release of a stunning new music video. 

Directed by Great Guns’ Brendo+Gonfiantini through LANDIA, the surreal film stars Brazilian actress Gabrielle Joie as a woman who awakens, crucified on an electric pole, in a dreamlike world. After untying herself from the cross, she commandeers a motorbike and rides through town as her appearance shifts and evolves. Alongside her journey, we see dizzying interludes of light, colour, and abstract imagery whilst the protagonist dances for the camera, her body and features distorted. Finally, she arrives back at the electric pole, as a blazing trail of flames leads back to another version of herself on the motorbike. 

Fresh off a Cannes Lions Grand Prix win for Mercado Livre’s ‘Feed Parade’, Brendo+Gonfiantini worked to tell a powerful, personal story about a battle against ego and the oppression and judgement we face in our lives. Looking to transpose the song’s psychedelic nature into 2021, the duo utilised virtual production and Unreal Engine whilst blending traditional 3D imagery with a video game aesthetic, crafting an uncanny world of transgression and surrealism. 

The duo also included a number of easter eggs throughout the film that pay tribute to The Doors’ iconic history. These include a visual parallel of the inner sleeve of the band’s LP ‘L.A. Woman’, which features imagery of a woman crucified on a pole, and a reference to an image of Jim Morrison as a child, balancing himself on the top of a bicycle. 

Directors Brendo+Gonfiantini comment: “Our goal was to create a striking homage to the original track by connecting all generations of listeners and bringing modernity and technology to an intense narrative. A question that we asked ourselves many times was ‘how do we create a new psychedelic look in a world immersed in games, with a sense of magic and unthinkable possibilities?’ With that in mind, we worked with Unreal Engine to translate all this psychedelia into a gaming language, imbuing the track with all the glory and contemporaneity it deserves.”

The video premiered on December 3rd at 11am PT on The Doors YouTube channel.