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Music video explores youth, seriousness

By Hannah Scott, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

Published 4:35 PDT, Fri May 28, 2021

Richmond-raised musician and actor Amanda Sum explores the coexistence of youth and seriousness in the music video for her new song, Hot Headed Egos.

Sum wrote the song in March 2019, when she was applying for some acting gigs but ultimately was not successful. The people who got the jobs, she noticed, were older and more experienced.

“It made me feel a little insecure that I was seen as someone who had potential and had the skill of someone who could do the job but was never trusted, and that just got a little frustrating,” says Sum. “I know I’m still very young, but it feels now that I have some things under my belt—but it’s hard to feel trusted by the outside world when I appear with a youthful demeanour.”

Sum started planning the video last summer, as well as recording the song, but changes to pandemic protocols and unsuccessful applications for grant funding meant the final product was a smaller-scale offering than she originally envisioned.

“We just adapt as we go, and I’m grateful for the time that it took to make it because it just made it what it is,” she says. “It’s cool to see how you can make a dream, ‘huge budget’ version of it and then you can also make a small-scale version of it which has as much or more heart than what a huge amount of funding could do. I’m really appreciative that the people that we had were able to lend themselves to it, and part of me is glad we didn’t get these things because it fuelled us to make something on our own.”

For the music video, Sum wanted to work with an all-Asian female band. And the two directors were people she’d met at university, also emerging female artists—in line with the themes of the song.

“It is really important to be talking about these things,” she says. “Sometimes being young and unassuming, I will acknowledge, is a great advantage—and sometimes it’s not. I think this song touches on both areas of what that is. As I mature and grow and experience more things, hopefully my perception of that will change.”

It’s exciting and scary for Sum to have her video released to the public, especially since it’s being released online as opposed to a live theatre premiere. And, given the song was written more than two years ago, she also had to find a way to 

“For me I was like, how do I find the joy in the song again? How do I make it still important to me and necessary for me?” says Sum. “The video helped freshen it up again and find the excitement of something that seemingly existed for so long before anyone outside of our little team could experience it.”

To watch the music video for Hot Headed Egos, click here.


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