In May 2025 I was asked to make a music video..
The mission?
Pitch, plan, prepare, direct, shoot, edit and deiver a full narrative music video.. in 20 days.
The mission was accepted, and in my experience narrative music videos (in my lo-fi, one man band production, guerilla filmmaker world) are HARD and expensive to make. This wasn’t an exception.
The project damn nearly broke my mental health.
I came out of the otherside a little bruised..but not beaten.
So it requires every ounce of energy, random contacts from my book, lots of favours and random requests from pals to get the job over the line.
Both creatively and practically.
Who?
I’ve made many many videos for gothic doom-metal legends Paradise Lost over the years, in fact 2025 marks 10 years since our first collaboration together with the ‘Beneath Broken Earth’ performance video.
(That one video seems to have become a doom metal favourite amonst fans of the band, and even fans of the doom genre in general)
Want to know how I made the video?
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to making videos.
I want it to be NOT shit. So to my own detriment, I’ll always go the extra 100 miles over budget and time to deliver something that (to me) isn’t going to suck. But compromises are always made along the way.
The song is called ‘Silence Like The Grave’.
The video was released on 6th June 2025 and has had 803,000 views on YouTube to date, which is pretty cool. PL have a fantastically loyal and engaged fanbase who really get stuck in.
My spin on the theme for the video (with some theme direction from the band) was looking at creating scenes where an ex-warrior was haunted by his past and now sits with the silence after the battles, and is now telling stories to the family group around a fire.
He uses shadow puppets against the fire, like in ancient times gone by, to tell his tales and pass his knowledge to the next generations.
The motif of the video is really the sword though, which I liked to visualise in as much of a ‘cinematic’ and dramatised way as possible.
The sword featured belongs to my good friend Monika, who kindly lent it for the duration of the shoot ❤️
Here she is holding the sword in a majestic shot from the end of the video.
Here I am, dicking about.
I had an awesome filming crew
Ash, Nigel and Tom (DoP) on a very very wet shoot day in the Yorkshire Dales.
We filmed a large chunk of the video in Yordas Cave. An incredible natural indoor cave approximately 15 meters high/wide and 50 meters long.
We had some very powerful lights for the production which were perfect to illuminate the entire space inside.
We also had a shoot on the most perfect day on top of a hill as the sun was setting, so I could shoot some silhouetted battle scenes against the clear sky, which formed a large part of the visuals.
Here are the stars of the battle!
A big thanks to my friends for showing up and dressing up.
I borrowed a lot of LARP’ing kit from a kind friend of a friend, who was super lovely and gave me loads of cool swords and shields to play with, all at super short notice. Thanks Wayne!
Another fun part of the video filming, was the intro where I filmed at my friends Leons workshop. He’s a blacksmith - so I had a blast shooting some red hot smoking shots of a sword being ‘forged’ (even though it isn’t technically forging and he knows this not how you make an actual sword - this was just a quick visual mock-up of ‘a sword being made’ getting lots of flames and heavy tools involved)
The last part of the puzzle was some vocal performance shots from the vocalist Nick, which we shot against a simple white backdrop. In the edit i played with the contrast and added some extra overlays of dirt falling to give it an uneasy feeling.
I’m happy with the way the video turned out under pressure and always theres a hundred things I might do differently given different circumstances.. but I like the vibe of it 🗡️ ❤️
Here is the full video, give it a whirl and comment what your favourite bit is (or isn’t)
Also worth stating that NONE of the video was Ai generated. It was 100% filmed on my camera, and 100% edited/manipulated in Adobe Premiere.
I’ve seen a couple of comments on YouTube that suggest it was Ai created 💔
I can see how some silhouetted battle bits look a bit odd.. it’s because I used a slow shutter speed for the action to make it feel kind of dreamy, then I simply overlayed a couple of different takes. I like the trippy morphing-like effect it naturally made.
