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 18th, 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 than, 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. So, preparing the light equipment in the morning, standing on a ladder in about 3m height in the theater, was quite dangerous for Kevin, who still wasn’t sober at all. Luckily, we were 8 years younger back than 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 the production of music videos can get into the five digits price range easily, we felt that the final result really wasn’t as bad as we first expected that it might get (given the fact that we really 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 like, eventually leaving us with a ton of takes that all had different colorings that just didn’t fit together. So, we tried to add some 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: The biggest reason that the video started to gain so many viewers on YouTube was a complete coincidence! Back when the video launched 8 years ago and you typed “Metal” in the YouTube search bar, the first result was our video, which is totally crazy if you think about it! So for quite some time “The Pulse of the Dead” video was the most metal video on YouTube, haha. Maybe that’s why the famous YouTuber PewDiePie used two short excerpts from our song in one of his videos, which helped the video to gain even more popularity in a very short time, which helped with the YouTube algorithm, which lead to even more views. It really 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=349So many comments on his video where “What’s the song at 33s?” and as a result of that 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 the video, always looking for cool poses and adding more action to the performance. Well, that could have turned out quite nice, but given the fact that we hadn’t a great gimbal nor a steady cam, it resulted in a ton of takes that didn’t work out in the final video, since the positions of those two would change randomly from take to take or were completely out of focus, leaving us with just a few useful sequences, which made the process of cutting the video a nightmare.
5. The missing story
Initially the video should have had 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).
Here is one of our tests we made with the story shots back then:
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 for “The Pulse of the Dead” back when the official video was released eight years ago, which contains a lot of outtakes and funny shots. And even if you have already seen it, it should be more interesting to watch it again with the 5 things you learned about the video today.
