Charles Brisgand, Clément Gallet, Léo Berne and Raphaël Rodriguez have worked together since 2008, directing dark, weird and comic music videos and ads packed with humour, charm and clever camera work.

Their video for Rihanna’s track Bitch Better Have My Money has clocked up over 100 million views on YouTube, and their ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ film for Nike – a glorious ode to the city’s young athletes – was one of the most talked-about ads of 2018.

As part of our series looking at the working relationships of creative teams, we caught up with Gallet and Rodriguez to hear about the perks and challenges of collaborating with three other directors – and why they always shoot films in twos

CR: How did the four of you meet?
Raphaël: Megaforce has been going 11 years now. Charles and Clément met at school, I met Charles at graphic design school, and Charles met Leo on a skiing. Charles was the one who knew all of us.

CR: And how did you end up working together?
Clément : The first project we worked on together was a music video for Live Good by Naieve New Beaters [in 2008]. The leader of the band was working with Leo: he asked him to create a music video and Leo thought it would a good idea to ask us to help make it. It was a bit tricky visually – it’s quite complicated to explain but it was using green screen – so it involved a lot of graphic design skills. The video worked out well and we had good feedback, so we started working together more often.

Three of us – Raphaël, Charles and me – were already working as graphic designers, so we were still doing a bit of design work, and Leo was working at an advertising agency, but we kind of slowed down as we started to direct more, and then in 2011, we committed to Megaforce.