War Machine - Black Lights, Music Video

"Hello mate. We need another music video. It's called War Machine, and we want lots of war footage. What can you do?"



And so began the journey into some of the darker parts of the internet, in a quest to find war archive footage in the public domain. Little did I know that searching for this stuff would be as challenging as it turned out. Both in terms of viewing some of the material I did find (gruesome and incredibly disheartening, especially against the current backdrop of events in Gaza) and with certain technical errors inherent in the format of the material itself. Archive footage, scanned and rescanned, compressed for internet, downloaded and compressed again... Towards the end, I was getting some serious quality issues, with random errors appearing in my edit, meaning I had to be extra scrutinous at every step of the lengthy rendering process...

The shoot itself was fantastic. We finally got to revisit the idea of using a projector to cast footage onto the band; an idea that we had but didn't use, waaay back on our first project together for The Enemy music video. The shoot was incredibly hot, being based entirely in the Black Nights new rehearsal and recording venue on one of the hottest weekends of the year. The hot weather continued into the edit, and at one point I was editing on the iMac in the sweltering heat wearing nothing but a pair of Batman boxer shots. 

So I leave you with that graphic image, and an attempt at gallows humour to prepare you for this video, in which some very gruesome and very real things are recorded. Some of the stuff I found, I didn't cut into the video. It was too much.

However, the band have done a fantastic job of making a 'political' song and statement about the horrors of war, via an art form (music) that we can all relate to. As ever, the band have written an amazing song; one that pulls you in and forces you to confront some of the things they are talking about, and that we see in this video. If music, words or visuals here gives anyone pause for thought, and encourages anyone to do absolutely any small thing that goes towards stopping War and the promotion of Peace in our time... Then we've done our job.

Rather than signing off with my usual "Enjoy" I will simply ask that you watch, listen and think. Col