5 things you didn’t know about “The Pulse of the Dead”

Today 8 years ago we released our very first music video for a song called “The Pulse of the Dead”. On May 18^th, 2013 we would never have thought that this song and especially this one video could possibly have such an impact for the band - especially since we didn't have any clue about how to shoot a video at all. All we had at that time was one guy (Tobias Sturm) who knew how to manage a DSLR, a location and some rented video production gear.

Fun fact: For Tobi who shot the video back then, it was quite a life-changing experience. He had so much fun filming the video that he abandoned his studies before completion, changed his profession and is now a professional camera operator today!

So here are some things you definitely didn’t know about our “The Pulse of the Dead” video shooting:

1. The location

The video was shot in the local theater of our hometown Aalen. At that time our former guitarist Kevin was working there, which gave us the opportunity to rent the location for two days. Here are some pictures and the first test shot we recorded a week or so before the production began.

Fun fact: The day before the video shooting, there was a party in our rehearsal room where four of us (Kevin, Stefan, Benni & Tobi, the camera operator) had quite some fun. Preparing the light equipment in the morning, standing on a ladder in about 3 m height in the theater, was quite dangerous for Kevin, who still wasn’t sober at all. Luckily, we were 8 years younger back then and it was way easier to cope with nights like these, a lot of booze and very little sleep, haha.

2. The budget

The budget for the video was just around 800€ (about 970$), spent mostly for the rental of the location and the video production gear. Since music video productions can easily reach five-digit budgets, we felt the final result wasn’t as bad as we first expected it might get (given the fact that we had absolutely no experience filming and cutting a music video at all).

3. The blue color tint

It wasn't planned to give the video that blue color tint, but during the shooting there were different opinions and ideas about how the lighting should look, leaving us with a lot of takes that all had different colorings that didn’t fit together. So we added filtering and color grading to glue everything together and blue was the color that worked best. That’s how the video got its special look, which turned out to work quite well with now almost 8 million views on YouTube. Here you can see a short snippet of the ungraded version:

Fun fact: A big reason the video started to gain so many viewers on YouTube was pure coincidence. Back when the video launched 8 years ago, if you typed “Metal” into the YouTube search bar, the first result was our video. For quite some time “The Pulse of the Dead” was the most metal video on YouTube, haha.

Maybe that’s also why PewDiePie used two short excerpts from our song in one of his videos, which helped the video gain even more popularity and boosted the YouTube algorithm even further. It was completely crazy to watch the view counter increase every day.

First excerpt PewDiePie used in his “Magical Ponycorn Adventure” video:
https://youtu.be/jl3qKn39Ieg?t=33
Second excerpt:
https://youtu.be/jl3qKn39Ieg?t=349

We saw a lot of comments on his video like “What’s the song at 33s?” and as a result we got a lot of comments like “PewDiePie brought me here” on our video.

4. The production problems

About 80% of the takes were complete nonsense. In addition to the coloring problems, Kevin and Stefan decided to switch positions on the stage quite often while shooting, always looking for cool poses and adding more action to the performance. That could have turned out nice, but since we didn’t have a great gimbal or steady cam, it resulted in tons of takes that didn’t work in the final cut because their positions would change randomly from take to take or were completely out of focus. That left us with just a few usable sequences and made the editing process a nightmare.

5. The missing story

Initially the video should have included some story takes. A friend of us helped as an actor and we also wanted to use a real pig heart and blood for the effects (luckily that idea didn't work out because the local slaughterhouse had none in stock).

Fun fact: We also wanted to do a video for Time Tears Down. The idea was to put the band into a scrap press and make it look like we get crushed towards the end of the song. Well, that didn't work out, haha.

Making of video

In case you haven't watched it yet, we made a making-of for “The Pulse of the Dead” back when the official video was released eight years ago. It contains lots of outtakes and funny shots. Even if you’ve already seen it, it’s worth watching again with the 5 things you learned about the video today.