Ambiguous Visuals Bring Together Light and Shadow in Sampha's Magical Music Video

SMUGGLER director Saad Moosajee creates a spectral video for track ‘Can’t Go Back’ from Sampha’s latest album ‘Lahai’. Saad uses a combination of live action alongside impressive CGI / VFX to bend time and reality, culminating a wonderfully ambiguous visual. 

Director Saad Moosajee said, "‘Can’t Go Back’ is a story about trying to get back to yourself. The film was inspired by the idea of time traveling through memories – moving forwards and backwards through a metaphysical world. 

"Sampha’s initial brief was expansive, mentioning everything from wormholes to the spirituality of nature. I drew inspiration from both magic realism and afrofuturist literature, imagining a visual style equally stark and surreal, centered around light and shadow. A key visual inspiration was cameraless photography – Infrared light, the photograms of laszlo moholy-nagy, the black paint known as Vantablack. 

"It was through these types of natural visual phenomenon of Light and shadow, that I attempted to visualise this interplay between the natural spiritual qualities of nature and the more scientific elements of the universe mentioned in Sampha’s initial brief. 

"It was an amazing experience working with Sampha, who is to me not just an amazingly talented and innovative musician but also such a grounded and curious individual. I have nothing but respect for the way he approaches music  – how with each project he carves new sonic territories that are also emotive. He gave our team ample creative freedom to experiment and to find something unique. We spent a lot of time in the preproduction phase dreaming up visuals for the world, discussing the art direction and talking about these critical concepts of time, space and memory.

"I think the most interesting thing about the approach is the different explorations of light and shadow across the different mediums of the piece. It’s interesting to think about the initial seed inspirations of cameraless photography and photograms, and how those ideas of light and shadow are explored throughout the piece – whether in the physical tree elements painted in matte white, the black hole lens refractions, or the glitch inversions of Sampha that almost turn him into two dimensional linework. 

"At times “Can’t Go Back” is almost like watching an inversion – that very simple notion of black and white and white and black, flipping forwards and backwards across mediums that are tangible and intangible, is the most interesting thing to me about the film. 

"The approach in “Can’t Go Back” was to create a film where each scene felt like a photograph, or a piece of art. The piece is grounded in the performance of Sampha within the wormhole as a structural element, cutting back and forth between him and a series of vignettes throughout the track. A variety of mediums were used interchangeably in the different vignettes – of particular note was the combination between live action production design and CGI / VFX. Physical sets painted fully in white were built practically, then mixed and combined with CG to enhance the stark, surreal aesthetic. This approach was used to create environments that were textural and tangible while still having an otherworldly quality – at times the imagery almost feels entirely like CGI, while still being grounded in reality.

"This combination was further explored in the lens effects and distortions. To push the feeling of time and memory in certain scenes, In-camera distortions were layered with VFX based refractions and blurs."

Q> How did you come to collaborate with Sampha on Can't Go Back?

Saad> Sampha and I met through Instagram back in 2020. He was already working on Lahai at that point and we spoke briefly about collaborating – connecting over a mutual love of visual worlds. We kept in touch loosely over the next few years and in early 2023 reconnected when his label sent over the brief for Can’t Go Back. 

Q> What is the track/video about, and what was your brief from the artist?

Saad> Can’t Go Back is a song that Sampha felt could be viewed from many angles and dimensions. One of the initial perspectives was from the point of a person who has arrived somewhere where time travel is possible. The idea of someone saying, essentially, oh you can't do something and then being sort of problematic, pushing and breaking through the impossible.

The other angle was focused more towards grief and denial, contemplating spirituality from a birds eye view – battling with what we think the world is. A battle between faith and evidence. Sampha best summed up the whole experience to me when he said “I think sonically there's a sort of impressionistic aesthetic. I think it feels quite like someone having a beautiful existential crisis”

The brief was to create a film that could bring this into a visual world, Sampha loved the idea of shooting things on film in a way where moments of magic and surrealism could be integrated –  magic realism was a key visual inspiration.

Q> Why were you inspired by cameraless photography in particular?

Saad> After discussing with Sampha and reading the brief, I began a process of visual research, looking for an art direction that I felt could articulate the sonic world of Can’t Go Back. The ideas of spirits, impressions, time, and portals were prominent threads in my explorations.

Something that was a commonality across all of these concepts, which Sampha and I were both drawn to, was their 2.5D quality –  a kind of ‘graphic realism’. A play of dimensionality, where we see things that feel as real as they do flat.

While I began by thinking of this with examples in the real world – black holes, solar eclipses, the material known as Vantablack, the concept became most exciting to me when I placed the physical phenomena alongside cameraless photographs (photograms). I started to imagine what a photogram would look like come to life, or in motion. My explorations became more defined towards a video rooted in Light and Shadow, and every aspect of the film process – cinematography, edit, visual effects, colour grade - was a chance to explore this. 

Q> Talk me through the process of bringing the video to life, and combining the live action elements with CGI/VFX

Saad> The process of creating the film began in pre-production through a series of concept designs and illustrations I created for the video treatment. These images were critical to establishing the world of the piece. 

From these concept images we reverse engineered how the different scenes and elements could be created practically, mapping out what would be created in live action and would be CGI. 

Matte painting, VFX compositing, CGI animation, physically painted sets, glitch processing, and light fx photography were some of the techniques employed to execute the vision. The mediums were used interchangeably, and to me produced the strongest results in the scenes that marry and integrated them together. 

In the film we see Sampha split between different time spaces and location, jumping and warping from a world of pure abstraction into the world of the tree. I created the world of abstraction by animating different passes of light inspired by the motion of gravitational lensing and black holes. These loops were then projected on a volume stage, which we filmed Sampha against. The graphic nature of the light and shadow often enveloped Sampha’s image - he becomes an accompanying shape, wavelength and tone.

The world of the tree was built through a mixture of CGI and practical sets, which were combined together to achieve the scale I wanted and the otherworldly, stark effect. I was inspired by the behaviour of infrared light on trees, and wanted to create a space that felt very light, with almost a heavenly quality to it. By editing these bright, starkly white vignettes against the more shadow imagery of Sampha in the wormhole, I hoped to create the feeling of watching an inversion play out in real time, flipping backwards and forwards through light and shadow, grief and denial, faith and evidence.