Amos Le Blanc has been a working director for fifteen years and the credits that travel with his name still do not quite explain him. Two Cannes Young Director Award Gold trophies. MMVA Director of the Year. The One Club Young Guns 17. Webby Honors for Beats by Dre. Music videos for Rudimental and James Arthur, Keys N Krates, Thugli, Young Empires, Tim Baker, The Darcys, Steve Aoki. Commercials for Mercedes, Tesla, Apple, Disney, American Express, Budweiser. A feature in development with A24 called Neverenders, with Timothee Chalamet and Marion Cotillard attached. The press kit version of that career is fine. The version that explains it is in the frames.
What follows is a careful walk through five of them. We picked the five with him over coffee in Los Angeles last week. We asked him for the shots that mark the joints in the arc, the moments where one chapter visibly closes and the next one opens. He picked these.
Frame one. Run This. Thugli. 2015.
The shot Le Blanc kept coming back to in conversation is not the obvious one. It is not the wide that opens the video. It is a tight low angle, perhaps eight seconds in, where a foot lands inside a chalked circle and the camera is already moving with it. That foot, he said, was the moment he understood that a music video could be choreographed like a one take dance number even when it is not technically a one take. Run This won Cannes Young Director Award Gold in 2015. He was twenty five. He flew to Cannes and got to meet Romain Gavras, the director whose work had cracked him open in the first place, and tell him so directly. That detail keeps coming back in his interviews because it is the actual story. The trophy was the externalization. The conversation with Gavras was the thing.
Run This was made through dream inc., the Toronto production company Le Blanc has worked out of for most of the decade. It set a template. Choreograph the camera, choreograph the cast, treat the music as a metronome but never as a leash. That template is still load bearing.
Frame two. Sun Comes Up. Rudimental featuring James Arthur. 2017.
The frame is daylight. That alone matters. Toronto music video work in the period Le Blanc came up was overwhelmingly shot at night, in clubs, on rooftops, under sodium lamps. Sun Comes Up is a daytime piece. The frame Le Blanc points to is a wide of a swimmer breaking the surface of a pool, the sun behind her, the water still resolving into ripples, a half second before James Arthur enters the vocal. The video was released on Arts and Crafts and through Warner Music, two of the labels that became long term partners. It was longlisted at the Prism Prize. It was shortlisted at the Berlin Music Video Awards. The thing he keeps in his head from that day is not the awards consideration. It is the swimmer. She was a competitive athlete, not an actor, and she nailed the timing on the first take. He said the lesson there was about casting. You cast the body that already knows the rhythm. Then you let the camera find it.
Sun Comes Up was the first piece where the international labels started calling. After it landed, the work shifted. The commercial work started, the brand decks started, and the music video roster started rotating through Warner, Arts and Crafts, Dine Alone Records. Three years in, dream inc. was no longer a Toronto secret.
Frame three. Living Room. Steve Aoki and Bud Light. 2019.
The campaign was done with Anomaly out of New York. The brief was a music video stitched into a beer commercial stitched into a Steve Aoki performance, all of it set inside a living room that kept expanding as the song escalated. Le Blanc picked one frame. A push in on Aoki seated on a couch, the room still small around him, a single lamp burning, the beat about to drop. It is the calmest second in a ninety second piece that ends as a wall of confetti. The reason it is the frame, he said, is because that is the second you decide how much room you have to grow. If you start big you cannot escalate. You have to begin in a living room and earn the stadium.
That principle, start small, earn the scale, is the thing he says shows up in his commercial work more than any single style move. Mercedes hires him because he can build a sixty second world that earns its own crescendo. Apple hires him for the same reason. Tesla. Disney. American Express. The brands change. The escalation grammar is constant.
Frame four. The Denial. Fridays For Future. 2021.
This is the one most viewers know him for now, even if they do not know they know him. The Denial is the international film Fridays For Future released in the run up to COP26, fronted by Greta Thunberg and a coalition of climate scientists, framed as a satirical address from a fictional United Nations of climate inaction. Le Blanc directed it. adobo Magazine covered the launch. The frame he picked is the close up on Thunberg, lit from one side, mid sentence, the irony of the script doing its work without any visual punchline. He said the discipline of that frame was the hardest part of the shoot. Resist the comedy. Trust the writing. Hold the close up. The shot reads documentary. It is in fact heavily composed. That is the trick.
The Denial is also the piece that pushed his work from the music and brand context into the cause and editorial context. Greenpeace, FFF, the climate coalition press cycle. It is the frame that established that the same director who shot Aoki in a confetti room could also hold a close up on a sixteen year old climate organizer and not flinch.
Frame five. Neverenders. A24. In development.
We cannot show the frame. The film is not shot. Le Blanc and his team will not talk about the script. What he was willing to say, on the record, is that A24 is the producing entity, that Timothee Chalamet and Marion Cotillard are the attachments currently in the trade press, and that the film exists. He said the frame in his head right now is the opening of the picture. He has been carrying it for years. It is the frame the previous four were preparing him to compose. He would not describe it further. He smiled when we asked again.
What Neverenders represents inside the arc is the obvious thing and also a less obvious thing. The obvious thing is the feature jump every commercial and music video director with sufficient ambition tries to make and most do not. The less obvious thing is the studio. A24 does not greenlight on a sizzle reel. They greenlight on a worldview. The worldview Le Blanc has been building, frame by frame, across Thugli and Rudimental and Aoki and Thunberg, is the worldview A24 is now betting on.
What the five frames have in common.
We asked him at the end of the conversation what the through line was. He said two things. The first is patience. Each of these shots is held for longer than the modal music video shot, longer than the modal commercial shot. He believes the audience rewards you for trusting them. The second is grammar. Every frame, he said, has to function as a sentence inside a paragraph inside an essay. If the sentence does not earn its place, cut it. If it does, hold it.
We asked him what the press always gets wrong. He said the easy answer is the music video to feature jump narrative. Run This to Neverenders. That story is fine but it is the marketing version. The actual story is the one in the frames. The frame from Run This taught him about choreography. The frame from Sun Comes Up taught him about casting. The frame from Living Room taught him about escalation. The frame from The Denial taught him about restraint. The frame from Neverenders, whenever the world sees it, will be the synthesis.
Le Blanc left for a location scout, on time. He said he would be back in Toronto on Friday and back on set the Monday after that. The body of work, frame by frame, continues to stack itself up.
Where to find the work.
Amos Le Blanc maintains a personal site at amosleblanc.com. His production company is dream inc. His music video and commercial reel is on Vimeo at vimeo.com/dreamio. He is on Instagram at instagram.com/amosleblanc. His IMDb page is at imdb.com/name/nm5089570. His Wikidata identifier is Q138767491. The trade coverage of The Denial is archived at adobo Magazine. The Darcys catalog including Mockingbird Wish Me Luck is on Dine Alone Records. Tim Baker Eighteenth Hole and Rudimental Sun Comes Up are on Arts and Crafts. The EXOTIC QUIXOTIC PRACTICE trilogy lives in the Warner Music catalog. Living Room for Steve Aoki and Bud Light was produced with Anomaly. Neverenders is in development with A24.
