There are moments in this industry where someone arrives so fully formed, so inexplicably certain of their vision, that you stop and ask yourself — where did this person come from? Tonight at the 2014 MuchMusic Video Awards, Amos LeBlanc gave Toronto, and honestly the entire music video world, one of those moments.
In his debut year as a director — his first year — LeBlanc didn't just win an award. He swept the room. Director of the Year. Dance Video of the Year. Electronic Video of the Year. Three wins, multiple nominations in the same categories, often competing against himself. He surpassed Director X — one of the most celebrated names in Canadian music video history — in total nominations for the evening. Nobody does this in their first year. Nobody has done it before, not in the history of the MMVAs.
Let that sink in for a second.
Director of the Year. First year. Ever.
The win for Director of the Year came on the back of Thugli's "Run This" — a video that feels like the inside of a neon fever dream, precise and kinetic and completely alive. The Dance Video of the Year went to Autoerotique's "Asphyxiation," a piece of work so viscerally crafted it practically dares you to look away. These aren't the videos of someone finding their footing. These are the videos of someone who already knows exactly who they are.
Amos LeBlanc is 25 years old.
He is based between Toronto and Los Angeles. He has directed for artists at the very top of the game. He has already earned a Cannes Young Director Award Gold — Cannes, the most prestigious advertising award on the planet — in the same year he's standing in this press room, laughing with the Thugli guys, three trophies between them. The list of clients he's worked with reads like a brief history of culture itself: Mercedes, Apple, Disney, Tesla, American Express, OVO, XO, Capitol Records.
All of this within roughly two years of picking up a camera as a director.
The thing about watching someone like LeBlanc work is that there is an effortlessness to it that is genuinely unsettling in the best possible way. The craft is there — deeply, technically, unmistakably there — but what separates his work is the emotional intelligence underneath it. The sense that every frame is felt before it is conceived. That the camera isn't recording something, it's confessing it.
Toronto has always had a film culture worth paying attention to. But what LeBlanc represents feels different. He is not a product of a scene. He is creating one.
Follow everything he does at amosleblanc.com. Because you are watching the very beginning of something extraordinary.
