Behind The Scenes: Major Moment - Staged (Official Video)

Making music videos has got to be one of our most and least favorite things at the same time. How could it be? Well, it provides us with the freedom of self-expression once again, after creating the song, it allows us to add yet another angle or tell a completely different story from what the song is about. We totally love the ideation part of it, however, being an emerging independent band on a budget makes implementing some of those ideas impossible or requires some unorthodox solutions.

Being a Boston-based band makes our choices for creatives to work with very limited - Boston is simply not a creatively thriving city, believe it or not. It made us look outside, and while we’ve found some amazing people because of it over the years, it’s obviously less than convenient. We’ve already worked with cinematographers from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New York. We record all our music in Maine. For the music videos for “Overcome” first, and now “Staged” we had to not only work with the cinematographer from Europe but also gear up ourselves and utilize our own skills. It only took us about 2 years.

Telling stories is a crucial element for us while filming music videos, we don’t really like performance videos where all you see is the band - it’s kind of boring and lazy. On the other hand, most cinematographers don’t want to bother with a complex project if the budget isn’t there, and with indie bands, it often isn’t. While planning some music videos for our new album “The Pain That Makes Us Grow” back in 2022, we’ve decided that “Overcome” and “Staged” would be the two songs most fitting for performance videos, but with a twist - all locations would have to be artificially created, built in Unreal Engine. The performance would then have to be filmed on the green screen, but turns out even finding a chroma key cyc wall in Boston is next to impossible, who would’ve thought?

We found a cinematographer we liked, but they live all the way in Europe, so it wasn’t possible for them to film the band - they were not planning to come to Boston any time soon, flying the whole band to Europe is just cost-prohibitive. We had to clear up our rehearsal space, buy a bunch of large green screens on Amazon, get some pretty expensive lights and a camera, and get to work.

When the performance was finally filmed, another problem became apparent - transferring over 3TB of footage with some pretty heavy files is not easy. After trying multiple different services to no avail, we then decided to upload everything on the hard drive and physically mail it. When the project was halfway done, we received a message from the cinematographer that the laptop they were working on got stolen. Although our footage was backed up, the project had to be re-built from scratch, so naturally that massively delayed the release.

Through all the troubles, line-up changes, and working on the project on two different continents, we’re very happy that the music video for “Staged” is finally out. What better song to have the world artificially built for than the song about how nothing around you feels real. Would you believe it was shot DIY-style in a dingy rehearsal space?