Behind The Scenes: Hellucination - Do Ut Des (Music Video)

The idea for the music video setting and backstory came from Domenico, our friend and director of the video. He had this really cool idea of reenacting this dark looking sacrifice, personifying Rome with both a wolf, it’s historical symbol, and a young girl. The video shows this sinister parade that leads to the sacrifice of the wolf/girl by this sort of cult of people, representing the people of Rome, and how they basically are the reason of Rome’s own decadence and decay. All this plotline follows the lyrics of the song, where Rome is depicted as both a grand ancient city, beautiful and magnificent, and at the same time extremely corrupted and very dark.

The shooting happened right before the start of the official lockdown here in Italy, and we were insanely lucky! Otherwise we would still be waiting to shoot it at this moment. The set was in Villa Ada, a beautiful huge public park which was originally a nobleman’s estate. Domenico found this beautiful abandoned temple looking structure which fitted very well with the atmosphere of the video. The shooting took a whole day, from early morning until sunset. We had the chance to contact and work with this amazing kennel of Czechoslovakian Wolfdog breeders called “L’Aurora del Lupo” which graciously lent us two of their beautiful dogs to play the role of the “Wolf Rome”. We all were extremely excited to meet the wolfdogs and they were so sweet and nice, and as you can see, they really do look like wolves! We shot lots of scenes with them, and I got to interact a lot with them, and it was a wonderful experience.

Jessica, my incredible girlfriend, not only took care of hair and make-up in a stunning fashion, but also really helped us figuring out all the details of what we needed on set, since she’s a professional make-up artist who works on movie sets, and was truly the person behind the production aspect of the video. Along with her, Silvia, our bass player, helped a lot as well, providing costumes and kept everyone updated on how the preparation was going. The people in the park were very curious about our set, and lots of them stopped by asking what was going on and if they could be around looking. We even had two soldiers who were doing security inside the park who came by and asked if they could stick around the set for a bit!

So all in all it was a very interesting and cool experience, but it took a lot of preparation and work to get everything right, and seeing the final result I can safely say we are very proud of the video.