Lyric video production diary
Initially, I envisioned a visual interpretation of each verse and chorus throughout the song. However, after plotting everything out, I decided that the concept was too literal. I didn’t want it to enter the cheesy territory of that awful Eve 6 video with the girl putting dude’s actual heart in a blender. Super cringe. Instead, I settled on mixing typography effects and animations to achieve a more balanced feel.
I was also concerned about coming off too heavy handed with the song’s message. Most of our songs are not political, but this one is. I wrote it as a frustrated reaction to the 2016 US Presidential election results. As such, I included imagery in the lyric video symbolizing the Trump regime sinking the USA underwater as the American flag fades to grey. While I included a simplified image of Trump Tower rising, I committed not to depict The Donald’s face anywhere in the video. Honestly, after living through four years of him dominating every news headline, I was seriously sick of seeing the guy.
The song’s verses mix subtle icons and simple animations with a single serif font. To round out the rest of the music video, I edited together some footage of us playing in our practice space. I separated the color channels to give it a lo-fi analog feel, and played with speeding up, slowing down, and reversing the footage to spice things up. Then, I added a mixture of glitch effects to the words as they transitioned. Finally, for the end of the video, I reversed the imploding Earth animation I used in the chorus. At last, the long national nightmare is over, as promised in the ending lyrics.
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