Behind The Scenes: Quitter - Sword Fights (Official Video)

The idea for the ‘Sword Fights’ music video comes from a shared love of a particular aesthetic, with Sean of Vivid Affect Productions who filmed and edited this one.

We’ve had a few plans in the pipeline over the years around the colors and atmosphere of a golden hour / suburban late summer evening. For this one, we filmed it in his parents’ back garden on the last night of summer - a surprise mini-heatwave in Scotland in September where we got our summer back for 2 days!

Our aim was to capture that leafy, quiet, and sleepy suburban look, something vaguely retro and American looking, to reflect the musical style of the track. The sky was always going to be the main character, so we crossed our fingers for some night light yellows and blues, fading into deep indigo and navy as the sun went down.

It was really fun to film as we finished work at 5, met up by 7, and had about 2 hours to figure out how the shots would be framed and what the rough ‘arc’ of the piece would be and to get it down. A bit of improvisation and Sean standing in the bushes later and we had some really nice shots to complement the sleepy, happy/sad, and reflective feel of the music.

The concept of the video was something I’d dreamt up as we were discussing our love for simple one-shot music videos. It’s hard to capture and maintain people’s interest in a music video when competition for attention is rife and the format has so many tropes to avoid in order to stay original. I reverted back to my love for simplicity and restriction - I’m a firm believer that something raw and genuine tells an emotive story a thousand times better than an approach that’s high budget, high concept, and high production.

I knew the song was short, dreamy, and had a simple structure, so we played with this by making the visual run at half speed but in time to the music, keeping it one shot of me as the audience waited for action, forced to listen to the lyrics rather than be distracted by the visual. And I wanted to perform the reverse of what the audience hears, by ‘singing’ the instrumental, with words that match up to the lead guitar line and create a bit of dissonance between the visual and audio and suddenly grab the audience out of their reflective state. From there on out it was just the summer night sky stealing the show.