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This video began with a very basic idea, which was to simply make a foot chase. Personally it’s something I really enjoy filming and I hadn’t gotten a lot of chances to film action in a while.  That said, the song is five minutes long and a five minute foot chase is pretty hard to keep consistently interesting (believe me, I’ve tried).

 

So the trick was to figure out a through-line and some sort of narrative, which would allowed this foot chase to happen.  The set up was a difficult thing to crack, plus the song has a massive breakdown half-way through which had to be reflected by the visuals. The idea was to have the chase go through a club which would not only facilitate the visual changes that would hit as soon as the music changed, but also contextualise the bands performance which would form the spine of the video.

 

However there was still the problem of forming a compelling narrative reason for the chase. The eventual concept of using a haunting death-like figure came from watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the film revolves around a knight making his way back from the Crusades, continuously haunted by the figure of death with whom he has an un-finished chess game. As he makes his way across the devastated and often surreal landscape, Death is always there watching him. So on it’s most basic level, I just took that as a concept and decided to make a more surreal style of video then was originally intended. Originally when I had this new idea the video was meant to end with a chess sequence as a homage to The Seventh Seal but the band was understandably a little sceptical about this as a concept and I ended up just dropping the idea.

 

The filming was actually quite efficient. I did a night scouting, looking for interesting locations. Edinburgh seemed like the perfect place, due to all the alleys and closes, as well as the somewhat gothic look of the old town. I generally tried to shoot through structures (like railings or poles) or along walls to give sense of pace to the visuals.

 

Each location had a shot list of various angles and we just cycled through. We completed Cowgate sections first since it was very quickly filling up with drunk people but considering we were shooting on a Friday night we had very few problems. We managed to upset the “staff” of one of the Saunas, who got mad about us filming on the steps outside the building and threatened to call the police. Otherwise the major issues were just dealing with through traffic and trying avoid drunk people jumping into shot.

 

The day of filming for the club stuff was completely different. I don’t like filming live footage, it limits what I can do. By staging the live section I had more control. We cycled through the song three times with crowd so I could grab shots from behind the crowd. I used strobes and set the camera so that there would be a large amount visual distortion because I felt it fit with the electronic sound of the band.

 

Then we moved into individual coverages of each band member. After that we shot Nathan’s (the actor playing the guy being chased) section in the club, with people reaching in and smacking him about. The basic goal was to make it feel almost like he’d travelled to different plain of existence, (ie hell) and this were the visuals get really surreal, with colour changes, flash guts and time-lapse.

 

BTW, I’m just going to say right now, there is absolutely now deeper meaning to this video beyond, guys sees death and runs away, sees him again, runs away again. I’ve had numerous theories about what the hidden meaning is and I think that’s awesome, read into it to your hearts content, but it’s really just supposed to be a bit of fun.

 

HIGH POINT: I like the opening build up and the tracking shot of the alley where the figure appears