Behind The Scenes: Weight Of Emptiness - Defrosting (Official Video)

After the satisfactory experience of making the video clip "Chucao" for Weight Of Emptiness, the band commissioned me to make the video of what would be one of the singles from the next album "Withered Paradogma", released recently.

I loved the song from the beginning, so it was very motivating to participate thinking that it would be different from "Chucao". Defrosting's lyrics are by Alejandro, so from there the first ideas were born, which I talked about mainly with Juan Acevedo, the song's musical composer. I brought Joaquín Cacciuttolo into the production, a brilliant photographer and friend with whom I have worked on my films.

What Juan wanted most was for the band to appear playing in the snow, a different setting from the band's previous video clips. So the issue of locations was essential. The idea of using drones to give a majestic view of nature appeared and Mario Urra, the bass player, proposed the inclusion of a fire artist to contrast with the snow. With these very simple elements: fire and snow, we built a symbolic story of this thawing that the band proposed. In the middle of the winter of 2022, we went to “Cajón del Maipo”, in the Andes Mountains, near the city of Santiago de Chile, to decide the places where we could record the band and what deserved to be recorded with drones.

A week later we went to record with the Drone Flights team (Jennifer and Renato), but there was little snow left. In any case, we managed to record impressive images in the “El Yeso” water reservoir and on the road to “Las Melosas”. The idea of the drone was also to simulate the passage of the Andean condor, the largest bird of prey in the world, which observes the majestic mountains from above.

The following week we went to record with the whole band and since we knew that the locations we had chosen would no longer work, due to the melting of the snow, we moved to the “Lagunillas” sector, a place close to the original plan where we had to improvise all the locations. Chance gave us the discovery of an abandoned house that served as our base of operations to film near the snow and the forest, as well as a closed place to film the solo performance of Katrina, the artist of fire, where we had to cover up the windows with the band backdrop and the vocalist's “poncho” (outerwear consisting of a square or rectangular blanket, made of wool, with an opening in the center to pass the head through, and that covers from the shoulders to below the waist), to create the total darkness necessary for those scenes.

In general, we film with two cameras and natural light. It was a long and intense day, we arrived before the sun appeared and we left after it went down, as it appears at the end of the video. It was sacrificed to walk with the instruments through the mountains, install the drums a couple of times, walk with the implements for the fire, and go up and down the hills, Alejandro had a slight limp and yet we had him walk on slopes and snowy sectors, with her big boots, which are part of his costume. However, there was an excellent willingness and collaboration from the entire team, we all wanted to make a good video.

The trade teaches you that not everything that is projected turns out, so you have to know how to change some pieces without losing the main idea. And finally, many times things turn out even better than originally planned. At the end of the day, we all knew that there was very good material to put together the video.

In post-production, I was in charge of the entertaining editing process. That the musical theme is to my liking is essential to be able to capture the emotional pulse. Then the image post was made by Joaquín, specifying the idea of unfreezing the video based on color. In this stage, the images of the mountainous environment were also greatly enhanced.

We are very happy with the result, the video clip helps to present the power of the band performing their music, it elegantly complements what the lyrics propose and allows the song to stand out as a musical work.

Lucho Villegas.

Director