The sparks fly on Abysmal Dawn's new video for "Programmed to Consume" -- literally.
There's a construction worker in the background of a warehouse set sliding a whirring buzzsaw up and down a steel beam while the band delivers a sturdy barrage of death metal, frontman Charles Elliott scowling and screaming his way to oblivion. There are electric eyes, whose irises open and shut menacingly, displaying the Abysmal ones on TV monitors.
Then there's that drain pipe dripping, then spewing black fluid onto the ground. Maybe that's why the guys look so pissed. These days plumbers charge $100 just to step in the door before they even flash their ludicrous repair estimates before your face. And since you're already $100 in the hole, nine times out of ten you'll give them the job rather fork out another estimate payment to another plumber.
A word of advice to the steelworker: If you keep sawing at that beam, all the teeth on the saw are gonna fly off and you'll have a harder time intimidating the plumber into lowering his fee.
To be honest, we're not completely sure what director Gary Smithson (High on Fire, Goatwhore) was after with all the imagery -- probably something about the oppressiveness of Big Brother and greedy plumbers. Click "more" to read Elliott's play-by-play comments about the shoot, then watch the video, which will debut on-air on Saturday's "Headbangers Ball," which runs from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. on MTV2.
Our new guitarist Ian and I arrived around noon at a somewhat dilapidated (aren’t they all?) 20 or so story building in downtown L.A. The director Gary Smithson was there to greet us and let us know where to park the van lent to us by our friends in Dreaming Dead/Exhausted Prayer. Our previous van had just taken a s--t on the Relapse Contamination tour so it was essential to borrow one now. The other guys haven’t arrived yet so we take the creepy elevator near the top of the building to the floor where the shoot is happening.
Judging by the magazines they have lying around, the place appears to be a studio where they shoot half naked women for Maxim and s--t like that. When we walk in, we’re totally surprised by the amount of people working on the set. There was a catering girl, makeup girl, light guy, general helper, an extra for a construction worker dude and the director Gary, of course. This is a relief to us considering our first video was shot by a porn director who shot everything himself with a handheld camera. We had a light guy in the past but not nearly of the same caliber as this. Perhaps the only regressive element of our new video is that there aren’t any porn actresses or adult movie sets to be found in it. Maybe we’ll CGI those f--kers in when we release it on the special edition DVD!
Our drummer Terry [Barajas] arrives on usual drummer time and we start loading the gear into the death trap elevator. We are getting a little nervous since our bass player Mike [Cosio] hasn’t shown yet and the place was kind of hard to find. I give him a call, but for some reason his number isn’t in service. I call his dad and he tells me Mike got drunk last night and lost his phone, but that he’s on his way. This brings a reaction of relief and “what the f--k was he thinking”? We are also waiting for our friend Shawn McPherson a.k.a “Shootie HG” to come down and take pictures of the whole process.
I start pacing around the building just in case they happen to drive by. Somehow they sneak by me, though, and it's back upstairs to get down to business.
Mike seems to be rocking the holy-s--t-dude-I-just-woke-up-from-sleeping-on-the-arm-of-this-person's-couch-and-man-am-I-hungover look. Luckily, since we have a Metallica-sized budget for the video (read sarcastic tone here), our makeup girl makes him look like less of the living dead. In hindsight, we probably should have kept him looking like the sweaty pale mess he was at the time; it would have been more in line with our stage show. I guess each of us need work though since all of us end up in the makeup artist’s chair. Apparently being a sweaty white dude causes a blinding glare in the camera. So why did we have our drummer Terry do it, you ask? Honestly, we just made Terry put foundation on so he’d feel like a jackass like the rest of us.
On to the brutality! After that whole process, we'ree ready to shoot a brutal fucking metal video! Gary and the light guy set up some shots and we're ready to headbang for the next 10 hours. A friend of Gary’s is kind enough to suit up in a welders outfit and sweat his ass off in the heat while using an angle grinder. It isn’t long until the landlord starts to freak out about all the sparks flying and sprinklers possibly going off (I think we left a guitar cloth on a monitor and it actually caught fire).
After Gary takes a while to set the landlord straight the punishing, grinding, death metal onslaught continues. Terry was actually a sport and didn’t mind being set on fire by the angle grinder with every take.
After a long day of playing our hearts out, setting s--t on fire, and seeing how fast we can spin our heads before they detached, we are out of time. We still have a few other ideas we want to shoot, so Gary and I discussed how we were are to get those done. We only have the location for the day and the camera and lighting equipment he rented need to be returned in two days. After talking it over a bit he suggests I come over to his place tommorrow to shoot the scenes in the parking garage of his apartment building. We agree, pack everything up, and take off.
The next day I arrive at Gary’s place in Burbank, sore as hell from yesterday's shoot. He's setting up equipment in the underground parking structure when I get there. We start taping some chains Gary bought at Home Depot to the ceiling with duct tape. Every once and a while the stuff just falls off the ceiling while we're filming because of all the dirt on the ceiling or, from me running into them. Things are much different today, but we're really grateful to Gary for making everything work and putting in the extra time. We don’t have the P.A. anymore, so we have to play the music back from Gary’s car stereo. The crew is gone as well except for the stage hand so Gary set up the lights himself.
The whole middle section of the video was shot in the basement of Gary’s parking garage while other tenants pulled in and out of the structure. No one really said anything though which was the funny part. Bunch of weird guys blasting some death metal, with a bunch of chains lying around and no one said a word. They knew better haha.
So, the performance part of the video is over and we leave it in Gary’s hands to work his magic with the editing. He buys a security camera iris somewhere and films a bunch of different angles to make it feel like the band is being watched. He also adds in some footage of fluorescent lighting, with the lights going on and off, which is a really nice touch. We feel like he captured the whole “big brother” vibe of the song perfectly and gave it that very cold feel we were looking for with the color choices. The final result is what you see now and we couldn’t be happier. We’d like to thank Gary for providing a kick-ass video for the budget we had to work with. We’d also like to thank Gordon and Betsey at Relapse for their support and getting this mother out there. Most of all though, I think we’d like to thank the lovely makeup artists that would pat the sweat off our faces, and reapply foundation after every take…bless your underpaid hearts haha.You all rule!
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