British videomaker Nima Nourizadeh is happy to shatter your suspension of disbelief. Distorting music video conventions, Nourizadeh frames his colorfully compelling clips with a playful sense of self-awareness. “I’m interested in how videos are made— what’s outside the frame,” he says. “I find there’s something quite nice about letting people in on what’s really going on.” In a post-Laguna Beach world, where fortunes are made by manipulating audiences to believe that what’s fake is “reality,” Nourizadeh’s videos throw a spotlight on the cracks and crevices of MTV’s counterfeit glamour. Whether it’s revealing a disinterested film crew standing just outside the frame of a heartfelt ballad (Lily Allen’s “Littlest Things”) or deconstructing the illusory enchantment of green screen technology (Hot Chip’s “Over and Over”), Nourizadeh is fascinated with the filters of artifice that irrevocably separate a music video’s performance from its audience. “I don’t want to hide anything,” he says. “I’m very much into people connecting with me, and showing them the rougher side of the video.”

His clip for “A Cause Des Garcons” by Yelle—who gained immense popularity on MySpace—feels like a professional production of a silly childhood musical fantasy. Revealing a soundstage decked out in cartoony ‘80s set-design flair, the video shows Yelle’s hairdryer and moisturizer springing to life to show off their impressive dance moves and prepare the unassuming star for a fashion magazine cover shoot. It plays like something Yelle might have dreamed up while singing into a hairbrush before the Internet catapulted her into international superstardom.

It was a trifecta of tremendous videos that first clued me in on Nourizadeh’s brilliance: Chromeo’s retro-CGI polygon orgy, “Bonafide Lovin’,” Hot Chip’s schizofrenetic Bat-dance homage, “Ready for the Floor,” and finally, the unsettling Jodorowsky-inspired spectacle of Santogold’s “L.E.S. Artistes.” When I realized all three of these stunning videos were directed by someone who doesn’t (yet) have his own “Director’s Label” DVD, I had to find out more about him. I was lucky enough to catch Nourizadeh while he was in L.A. on one leg of a whirlwind transcontinental video-shooting tour, working on a Flight of the Concords video (“For the band, not the TV show,” he clarifies). He graciously took the time to explain how he ended up where he is.

“I actually studied fine arts,” says the director, of his academic roots at Central St. Martins. “So it was quite far away from what I’m doing now. I always sort of lent more towards a commercial style, and I remember my teachers telling me, ‘You’ll do really well in the commercial world,’ which was intended as a bit of a diss— but I remember thinking, ‘Cool. Brilliant.’”

Nourizadeh fell into the music video racket when his brother, a house music producer, asked him to cut together some footage he’d shot to match one of his tracks. “Doing music videos wasn’t ever what I intended to do,” he says, “but I felt like I could get some clues to directing. I could learn the craft a bit.” Establishing a video collective dubbed “The Imaginary Tennis Club” with two close friends, Nourizadeh got the ball rolling by approaching up-and-coming bands at their gigs to propose collaborations. “These days I find bands coming to me that share my aesthetic,” he says. “It’s a nice change of pace.”

After going solo in 2005 with the Tennis Club’s amicable disbanding, the director hit it big with the lovingly satirical green screen-themed clip for “Over and Over.” Like a magician who can’t resist explaining his tricks, Nourizadeh uses the video to demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate the viewer with simple special effects, rendering the cold reality of a blindingly green room both lyrical and hilarious— without dismissing the excitement and energy in Hot Chip’s tune. “Boasting great performances and tons of little jokes for the taking, this video is nearly as infectious as the song itself,” noted one not-easily-impressed Pitchfork writer when the clip was included in their “Top 25 Music Videos of 2006” list.

One of Nourizadeh’s greatest strengths as a filmmaker is his ability to translate personal concepts and preoccupations across a wide gamut of styles in videos created for a smorgasbord of incongruous artists, without ever distracting his audience from their music or veering into obnoxiously heavy-handed territory. He never falls out of sync with the artist’s style or their song, even when he’s busy juggling Jodorowsky homages with explorations into squib mechanics, using a legion of horrified hipsters expelling neon orange blood from their chests.

An avid collector of art books that reference film, fine art, and even computer-generated imagery, Nourizadeh garners much of his filmic inspiration from still photography. “Because it’s a pure moment that’s been captured—it’s just a still—you can really examine everything in it. I can look at why it’s been composed in that way, I can really consider the lighting. It gives you something that watching a film, or other videos, doesn’t.” Pressed to list some of his favorite photographers, however, the director explained that he tries not to become overly attached to the work of any individual artist. “I just look through random reference books,” he says, “and in some ways, I prefer not even knowing whose work it is—’cause that effects how I perceive their work. I can’t think of where exactly I get ideas from— I know it’s a combination of all these things that have accumulated over the years, on a completely subconscious level.”

For Chromeo’s “Bonafide Lovin’,” however, the video’s point of reference was crystal clear: “Dave 1 [Chromeo’s vocalist] was really into anything from the 80’s or early ‘90s— so we started going through a bunch of videos we liked from that time, and Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ came up. And we both just suddenly went, ‘Fuck, that’s a really good video!’” Astonished by the visual similarities between the Laurel & Hardy-inspired CG characters in Dire Straits’ seminal video and the real-life appearances of Chromeo’s Dave 1 and P-Thugg, Nourizadeh quickly realized it was a match made in heaven, and set to work incorporating the song’s lyrics into his concept.

“For the actual animation of it, the hardest part was making sure the animators were really thinking that we don’t have today’s technology. Everything had to be made from a series of block shapes. If you wanted something that had a curve in it, it was about stepping blocks so it would appear to have a curve, rather than actually giving anything that rounded shape. In today’s standards, people are trying to make everything so photo-realistic. Everything’s gotta have a polish on it—but you don’t have to do it that way.”

I’d noticed a link between two of Nourizadeh’s videos and couldn’t resist inquiring about the deeper meaning of it all: “Ready for the Floor” and “L.E.S. Artistes” both feature the startling image of people being doused with buckets of paint thrown at them from off-camera. The director set the record straight on this strange coincidence: “With the Hot Chip one, it was a specific effect I was going for, and it turned out great,” he says. “With the Santogold video, it worked as well, because it fit with the concept of making a really gruesome scene. Dumping red paint over someone not only looks good, but it also looks quite graphic. And I knew I was going to get really great reactions from the girls, cause it was freezing that day. It was pretty authentic, I think, I how horrified they were.”

Mystery solved—just a jazzy visual effect coupled with a pinch of everyday cruelty. “I was actually thinking of doing it again, in the Concords video,” he says, laughing. “I thought, ‘That’d be pretty cool, if I had a signature bucket shot in every video.’ It’s good to be aware of what is good eye candy—what we actually enjoy looking at. And that’s one thing, copious liquids—people enjoy watching that. I’m just finding those things, over time… I’ve got one, so I’ve got to find a few more.”

With any luck, Nourizadeh will be able to pull out some of that eye candy in an aesthetically indulgent feature-length project sometime in the near future. “Doing videos is great, because it’s short, but it’s so intense. The amount you have to do is really such good preparation for making anything else,” says the filmmaker. “It’d be great if by the time I’m 35—I’ll give myself another five years—I’d have made a feature.” Let’s just hope Nourizadeh never stops coloring outside the lines.