ABOUT

I made a History Of Guns video once before; that was the Flash animated one for Exhaust Fumes back in 2008 (that was a song from their Acedia album).

​Max contacted me back in March 2024, while preparations were still underway for the launch of the new album Half Light; he sent me a copy of Drug Castle and Survive The Night and asked what I thought about making a back-to-back video for those tracks For better or worse I had stopped doing 2D animations some time ago but have been working with 3D visual effects like Maya for over a decade by this point and was up for creating something pretty unique. I listened to the tracks for the first time in a darkened room and they absolutely blew me away, so bleak and powerful was the imagery. I imagined the band all sitting around a campfire at night near the shore, playing the song while being plagued by demonic hallucinations or visions. I described this impression to the band and they absolutely loved it, so we went from there.

​I'm a huge fan of David Lynch and I often solve filmmaking problems by trying to imagine what he might do. This was certainly the case with Drug Castle; owing to the length of the piece I imagined a slow-burning and ambiguous narrative with harsh lighting thrown by the fire, with slow edits and dissolves. For some of the more way-out visuals I took inspiration from Lucio Fulci (the decayed corpse-like figure) and the KLF (the trio of handmaidens sitting on the rocks).

​There were also several shots with extensive use of 3D particle effects; these were achieved in After Effects using the CC Particle World plugin.