Houdini

Eminem's manager opens the video with a phone call. Dr. Dre follows it with worse news: the 2002 Slim Shady has come through a portal into 2024, and he is not taking the modern world well. Eminem's caped alter ego Rap Boy and Dre chase him across a Gotham-styled city while Shady rampages through present-day rap culture, until the two versions collide on a communications tower and merge.

Rich Lee's pitch was a single question: what if Shady from the 2000s got teleported into the modern day, and what if Rap Boy was the only person who could stop him. Building it meant a comic book brought to life, a city, a tower climb, car chases, and a cast of cameos including 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Royce da 5'9", The Alchemist, Pete Davidson, Jimmy Iovine and Eminem's own children.

Five days. Multiple locations at different times of day. And an entire set of assets that had to be designed from the ground up, because none of it existed.

On top of the environment problem sat a second one that had never been solved this way before: the video needed the 2002 Slim Shady standing opposite the 2024 Eminem, performing, in the same frame, convincingly enough to carry a comedy premise rather than a technical demonstration.

Every environment was built in Unreal and played in-camera, including the city, the car chases and the rooftop confrontation. The pitch deck itself was roughly ninety percent AI-generated and styled as a comic book, then used on the day as lighting and set-design reference, so the visual language was locked before anyone rolled.

The tower climb was shot on a set piece angled at forty five degrees with wind, with the camera rotated to sell the gravity. For the de-aging, Metaphysic ran a real-time face swap driven by Eminem's live performance, and supplied an eighty five inch AI Mirror on set so he could see young Slim Shady on his own face before a take rather than waiting for post to tell him whether it worked.

"Houdini" debuted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the Global 200, topped the charts in eleven countries, and became the first Eminem song to spend more than one week at number one in the UK. It passed one billion global streams by February 2025.

At the 2024 MTV VMAs it won Best Visual Effects, with the official citation reading "visual effects by Synapse Virtual Production, Louise Lee, Rich Lee, Metaphysic, Flawless Post", naming Synapse first. It also won Best Hip Hop. It went on to win seven Telly Awards in 2025, four Gold and three Silver, entered under Synapse Virtual Production, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Music Video at the 67th Grammys.