Director's Works
Surrija, Nothing Love Clarence Deng
Clarence Deng is a filmmaker whose short film and music video work -- like "Black Sheep" for psych rock band Spirit Mother and "Nothing Love" for electro art pop artist Surrija -- has played at festivals like LA Shorts, LA Lift-Off and New Filmmakers LA, as well as on platforms like Film Shortage and Beyond the Short. As a filmmaker and storyteller, he enjoys visually showing what can’t be said, and to push the boundaries for how moving image can inspire people.
I always love an excuse to work glitch art into music videos, and it seemed like the perfect aesthetic vehicle to fully explore the tension between numb dissociation and passionate emotional pain that the song spoke to. That and the pieces of the set slowly disappearing (and blending or distorting via datamoshing, CRT analog glitch fx, etc) really help drive our singer's visual narrative journey. Was a lot of fun to play around with and find the right visual rhythm to best capture the chaos in the performance on set and in the edit -- balancing both the technical precision needed to keep the process efficient, while keeping the digital organic feel of glitch art and preserving the emotion of the song. Feel free to sing along with the karaoke and embrace the noise.