Leifur James’ music is complex, textured, emotional. Following his critically-acclaimed album A Louder Silence (released on Night Time Stories), the electronic music producer is back with Angel in Disguise, a cinematic song inspired by loss and alienation. For his music video, James recruited the Hungarian director and animator Balázs Simon, a talented collaborator who also directed the musician’s previous videos, the stellar Wurlitzer and AAID. We connected with Balázs, currently in Budapest, to chat about the new challenges this video represented, as well as the meaningful concepts that inspired it.

In a recent interview, you mentioned your wish to work with more humans. And indeed, Angel in Disguise relies a lot on its protagonist, played by a live-action actress. Was that a conscious choice?

Yes, of course, that was a conscious choice! Most people only know my work with animation, but I gravitate towards this mixed media, the live-action kind of thing as well because I’ve never been great at creating still images with a pencil or a paintbrush. I'm not saying I hate those things, but I just can’t do them as well as I'd like to. I feel the same with photography. I gravitate toward things that operate with time, with movement, it’s a juxtaposition that excites me more. When you work with animation, you basically have to design every frame, and It's a very time-consuming process. It totally has this pre-planned feel.

When James sent the new track, initially I only presented him with live-action ideas because I was really interested in doing something different with him, and most of the pictures that came into my mind were live-action. So, of course, later we found a good middle ground of live-action and animation for the project.

What’s good with working with James is that it’s really collaborative, so it's not like your usual commission work where there's a brief and people present treatments, and you have to come up with everything beforehand. We really worked towards a solution gradually, we found the main themes and worked towards that. The idea of the final product wasn’t set in stone. We tried to find our way towards that thing, hoping we’d get there organically.

Even though CGI and animation aren’t as present as in your other videos with Leifur James, it still plays an important role in this story. It’s almost a character in and of itself. How did you arrive at that concept?

I was in Ibiza, at a really good music video festival, when I got the music. I was sitting at the seaside and, you know, sipping some orange juice, listening to the music… It was a really chill experience. Nothing close to what the music was projecting for me. It was a mixed bag of feelings. I was kind of on holiday, feeling well after loads of work, but then again, this feeling was mixed with everything that I found on the album. This alienation, the anxiety which projected a lot of images for me, that connected to the current state of our environment.

Somehow, I think these impressions meshed with this idea of seeing an ocean or a sea, but it’s not water, it’s plastic. I found that it was an interesting idea because, if you think about how the world came to be, first we had the ocean and not much else, and then came these storms in the ocean. It’s our understanding that that’s probably where life originated from. Now, our world, our oceans are getting polluted, and it can mean the death or the demise of the world as we know it, but somehow, I find that exciting…

I’m not a pessimist. I don't think life on earth will end. I think it’s a self-balancing system, so I try to play around with the idea that when we’re at a point where everything turns into plastic, somehow a new kind of life will emerge from that, like the life that emerged from the ocean.

Do you see the message of the video as hopeful?

I think it’s mixed. At least for me, it’s absolutely mixed. Also, I think that it’s exciting that plastic should be really ugly to look at, but at the same time, a lot of plastic stuff has kind of a nice appeal to it, visually. 

In the video, you really found the beauty in plastic…

Yeah, and I think that's interesting. That’s something to think about. When you look at a diamond, it’s beautiful, it’s absolutely beautiful… But it also brings a lot of negative things. People are fighting over it, it’s producing slavery… I’m not an expert in that area, but it brings all these bad things with it.

Beauty doesn’t only bring good things out of people. Nothing is ever just good for goodness sake, or beautiful for beauty’s sake.

Talking about the beauty of plastic, you worked with Eszter Takács for the production design. What was your creative process?

I think we’re both dreamers, in a different way. When I first presented her with my mood board for this project, I thought it was really out of touch with reality. When you do animation, you can do anything you'd like to do. It’s not absolutely true because there are technical limitations and, of course, time is the biggest limitation for a production. But you can do pretty much anything, and that’s different from live-action, so the most important aspect when working with her is finding common ground between the core idea of what I’m trying to express, and the reality in which we’re trying to produce the video. The places we can get to, the material we can get for it, and how to keep everything in budget, how to give life to this material in live-action. So, we worked mainly on these aspects - color balance and things like that. She was great to have for these aspects. She has a really good eye for finding these conceptual ideas with everyday objects, and she had a lot of thoughts on how to create a world with really few elements, and to find a way to bring all our ideas to life.

Speaking of mood boards, what were your inspirations and influences for the video originally?

I love Pinterest, but I don’t believe that Pinterest is always effective. You can find good references very easily on there, but after 5 or 6 treatments, you’ll most likely stumble on the same images over and over again.

Still, I always start out with doing the mood board, and then I try to find out why I came up with these images, what I like about these images, how are they connected to the idea? That’s the work aspect of it. I’m not inspired by images on Pinterest, that’s just a tool that perhaps can help me communicate my ideas to others.

Most of the time, I’m inspired by films from the 70s, actually. Or photographers. I especially like Alex Webb, Trent Parke. I think they’re amazing! As I’ve told you, I’m really not that good with still images, and I admire how some people can express ideas really easily with just a still, almost telling a full story. That’s really inspiring to me, even though I’m not trying to replicate the same idea in my work.

Do you find inspiration in music too?

Of course! When I get the music, I try to associate it with my own experiences in life. That sounds pretty easy because everybody loves music, and everybody can connect to music because of their experiences. But I think it’s a good tool because you can’t go wrong with building on real emotions. I always start with that and try to find some universal feeling, from that connection between different musical textures and what it evokes in me. I build ideas from that.

When you heard Angel in Disguise, were you inspired more by the sounds, the textures, the lyrics…

I’m never inspired by the lyrics. I’m not a native speaker, but I don’t think it’s because of that. I think what inspires me most is the structure, and then sound design. These are the two most important things for me. So, of course, the structure defines the narrative arc of the film or my idea. The texture is more of a mood: colors, shapes, forms, things like that.

From all these small parts, it becomes quite easy to build up a cohesive idea that can carry the emotion that I’ve had, and that is personal to me. But that’s never in the final movie, so it’s not about what I did last week… It might be about how I felt last week!

What’s your next project? Do you plan on working with more actors?

Absolutely, but right now it’s difficult because of the virus, so I’m just doing this home office work, mostly animation. I’m already well on the way with my next music video, I don’t think I can disclose anything about that, but it's in the works, and hopefully, it will be exciting. As soon as it’s over, I’d like to jump back into live-action and do stuff in that realm. Fortunately, there is a lot of work now, because people in animation can work from home, from all over the world, together.

I’m really lucky that we found some projects that can bring food to the table for quite a lot of people, that's a good feeling. You feel like you can do something with this situation because otherwise, it wouldn’t be as easy - or bearable - to just sit at home and do nothing about it. I really admire all those people who are at the front lines and who can do even better things. I’m also happy that we have a small community all over the world and that we can work together and have each other in this way.

Leifur James’ new album Angel in Disguise is coming out on June 5th. You can pre-order it now via his website.

For more videos by Balázs Simon, visit his Vimeo profile.