Feast of Fiends | Adavant Music Video

Adavant is a folk-metal band that I've been friends with for quite a few years. You may have seen our last video "Renegade Ridge" from Christmas 2018. If not, I highly recommend giving it a look. It's one of my favorite projects I've worked on through nearly no power of my own. Adavant's energy and the people they surround themselves with are indefatigable and inspirational through their sheer willpower and conviction.

For Easter 2022, Adavant wanted to release a new music video for their single "Feast of Fiends", which was described to me as a complete bloodbath of mythical creatures being eaten in increasingly brutal ways. For the visuals, Adavant and I decided that there should be a purely white room with the entire band in white - clothes, instruments, everything white. Then, as the bloodbath begins, they are absolutely washed away in blood, painting the clothes, instruments, and walls a dark, blood red. They also had a stop-motion artist create a happy-tree-friends meets robot-chicken depiction of some of the chaos and brutality showcased in the lyrics and wanted to ensure that both visuals could live together happily.

My first thought was that we would need a talented special effects artist to assist us. I didn't want to just buy a bunch of fake blood and do our best, I wanted to make sure we had someone on the top of their game to make sure that the blood looked good on camera and that we were being smart with where we placed it. Ariel Stafford is always the number one pick for me and everyone I work with because we always feel so taken care of. We of course prepped Ariel on what we would be doing and I told her to "tell me what you need and we will get it." This shoot is a testament to the idea that if you get the right people, get what they need, and get out of their way you'll be successful. Ariel was an absolute rockstar, making sure the talent knew exactly what was happening, keeping us all on track, and ensuring the blood looked incredible at every instance.

For pre-pro I actually used CineTracer again, which has been updated to a nice little software, especially paired with ray tracing.

Some stills of the original lighting concept can be seen at the bottom of the page.

The actual shoot from a logistics standpoint was challenging. Because of budget constraints we ended up having to create a white cyc outdoors by painting the outside of the band's rehearsal studio white. There were a couple of other ideas we tried that day that catastrophically failed. Adavant and their entourage not only got permission to paint the exterior of the studio white but had already sent people to get supplies before my team had even realized we had a plan B. In about 45 minutes they put multiple coats of white paint onto about 30 feet by 12 feet of wall.

We shot on a Blackmagic Pocket 4k system with my vintage prime kit. We went ahead and lit the scene with two 300d mk2s with space light attachments and a push from a Nova 300c panel through visqueen. The color process for this film involved a DaVinci color managed space, minor adjustments to keep the blood, skin, and white consistent, and then finally a pass through a film conversion to Kodak 5219 and 7219 depending on whether it's the dungeon or the white cyc. This film pass included 35mm and 16mm grain respectively. These color passes helped marry the colors between the claymation and live-action footage and also helped the aspect ratio changes feel a little less "jumpy".