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History Of Guns: Drug Castle

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.

The handmaidens began life as base meshes generated from Daz Studio. I then customised them extensively in Maya, adding the floral garlands, jewellery and robes which were draped on using nCloth. Due to their very brief screen time, I did not need to rig or animate them; only the lights and camera were in motion.

History Of Guns were amazing to work with, they were either really into my ideas or simply way too trusting of me, because they pretty much gave me full creative freedom to visualise my idea. We shot it in a single evening in June, down on the Kent coast, and they were very good natured and cooperative the whole way - even when I asked Del to lie in the freezing cold sea and be splattered with fake blood. Max got an antique oscilloscope to work in the middle of a beach without any mains power, for which I think he deserves some sort of commendation!

Post production took around two-three weeks with me creating all the 3D assets in Maya and Zbrush and doing all the compositing/colour grading in After Effects. I realised after the time that I could be seen reflecting in Del's sunglasses in numerous shots, and this led to a couple of panic-filled days trying to 'paint myself out'. But we got there in the end and I couldn't be more happy with the end result.