Above: Sorority Noise's powerful video for No Halo.
Your videos tend to be narratives and are often shot like documentaries. Why is that?
That’s what I want to do: long term, documentaries and TV and stuff like that. I feel like what’s really cool about music videos is that it’s very visual and you get to test out a lot of ideas and themes and feelings that you want to express, without having to do it in a 90 minute or two hour format. You can get your thoughts out in this very small thing and you’re free to try things because of that.
It’s allowed me to explore themes and people and try new things out. I’ve been able to hone in on the themes that I’m most interested in and the things I think I’m doing well, and the things I’m not doing so well. Hopefully I’ll learn from all of this and be able to take those lessons into longer form pieces.
With a music video, if things work out, I’m able to put out something I believe in and hopefully something that pushes my limits, but also expresses the band’s vision.
Accounting for the band’s vision, how much of yourself do you work into your videos? It must be a lot of pressure to carry the weight of someone else’s vision…
Honestly, I would say that if I don’t feel like I can put myself in the project, I probably won’t do it. I have to feel like I can see myself in these projects, or that I’m expressing something, cause that’s what filmmaking is. I want to share these stories through my lens.
The Menzingers video, for example, feels like a lot of things – past relationships and moments – that I’ve experienced and friends have experienced. And the Sorority Noise one is all about grief, and that’s something that came from Cam [Boucher, vocalist] and I just having conversations about grief and loss and talking to each other about the way we felt; the way I felt after losing someone and the way he felt after losing multiple people, and we took that and tried to express those feelings we discussed in a cinematic way.