Nelly Furtado Found the Lake Highlands Location for Her Video While Attending an Estate Sale

Two Dallas artists – Jake Elliott and Pierre Krause of After Deth Productions (ADP) – recently directed and edited the video for Nelly Furtado’s single “Pipe Dreams” off her forthcoming album The Ride. The video was released on Pitchfork earlier this week and has already received praise by Rolling Stone, The FADER and Fuse TV, to name a few.

“There was no initial concept,” says Elliott, who both shot and directed the video. “[Furtado] texted me and told me she was in Dallas for a day and wanted to shoot some visuals, like the Instagram content I had been posting, with the same camera.”

Elliot had only one Hi8 tape he’d been recording and re-recording on. He used that single tape to capture the “Maneater” artist at various places around Dallas last month. The final location was a Lake Highlands home Furtado had discovered days before at an estate sale. The home belonged to a woman named Edna Sue who had lived there since the 1950s, as Furtado explains on her Instagram.

“I arranged some things in the rooms and asked her to ‘stand here, sit here, more movement, less movement,’” Elliott says. “Small, shy direction. She is Nelly Fucking Furtado. I am just some kid. So I just made sure to leave with a bunch of footage."

But the shoot only took a couple of hours. “We didn't have to communicate much, honestly,” says Elliott. “There was a mutual trust. A lot of the footage was just us walking around the house, checking out the rooms, and playing the track to get a feel for it. Some parts she may have not even been aware I was filming.”

Krause managed to edit the footage while working two jobs at the Goss-Michael Foundation and Le Labo. “I edited it in sessions when I got out of work,” says Krause. “I would go to work, then would go to work at After Deth Productions, me and Jake's audio-visual collaboration and consulting partnership. ADP never sleeps.”

Krause wasn’t at the “Pipe Dreams” shoot but was brought on as a collaborator by Elliott later on and recalls meeting Furtado at a coffee shop in downtown Dallas solely by chance. “I didn't shake her hand because I had a really bad cold,” says Krause. “I was trying to be thoughtful but probably seemed like an asshole.”

Elliott says his meeting Furtado also happened organically, through Samantha McCurdy, another Dallas-based visual artist. “It was a week before Art Basel in Miami. We all got to talking about Basel and she ended up falling through my show that next week, even buying some art,” he says.

The video is already raking in hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, a step in the right direction for the Dallas-based duo and the ADP name.

“This is the most above-ground project I've ever done,” says Krause. “I tend to be more underground. More private with like a small cult following. More of a subculture type of artist I guess. I feel fine; a bit vulnerable, a little anxious – but in a good way.”

Seeing the video on Rolling Stone’s website made Krause feel like a part of history. “I feel like I'm playing a video game with cheats and just skipped like 10 levels,” says Krause. “But also, I'm ready. I'm blessed.”

When they aren’t shooting, directing and editing for A-list artists, Elliott and Pierre are making music videos for their own audio-visual project called Dabber.

“Working with Jake is very fluid and natural,” says Krause. “He's my pup. We're like demented siblings. We have our own language, but don't talk very much. Jake is one of my favorite people on the planet. I want to wear his face as a hat. I could make stuff with him all day. That's at the root of ADP. We excite and inspire each other. We also balance each other out. I am the dabby to his dab.”

As for ADP’s pipe dream, the two say working with Sean Paul would be the ultimate collaboration.