Enter the Devil: how we got to do Betzefer's "The Devil Went Down to The Holy Land" music video

There has always been a strong link between heavy metal music and stop motion. The textures, the darkness, the hard core imagery yearns for hand made nightmares, so when we had the opportunity to work on Betzefer's new music video for their new album, we got right into it.

Betzefer is a groove metal band with killer riffs, crazy growling and built-in savagery (you can check them out here). That's just what we wanted for their new music video, so the picking of the first track of the album, "The Devil Went Down to The Holy Land", with it's crazy beat, urgency and undeniable groove was natural.

In the next few posts i will try to give some information in "How we got to build some teddy bears, Capture three scorpions, use some chlorine, make coffee-scented sets, torture a Betzefer band member, burn hundreds of hours in front of a computer, slaughter some things, and generally do a lot of stop motion stuff".
But i would actually like to start with a few appetizers...So, here are some of the things i will be breaking down in detail in the next few days:

So, in a nutshell:

We started with a concept frame to get the right feeling...

The idea behind it: The devil having fun in a carnival in hell

the first concept frame we did

From that first impression, we started experimenting with design and materials, based on that, we made the devil's puppet.

The Devil

We wanted the eyes to glow like fire, so they were lit from within.

light him up

The body muscle was built in foam

More on the devil on posts to come.

Moving on to the "bear victims": 

We had seven different bears to build and prepare for animation. we built for the bears steel armatures to allow us make slight changes to each frame, adding up to the animation sequences. We built them with the specific movements in mind, so time and money could be saved. All "bear skins" were dyed, to create the different characters.

not a bunch of dead squirrels

 I will talk a lot more about the bears and their armatures in a specific post.

 Pre production

 Everything was shot over green screen, so we did extensive testing on it....

The strategy was to save as much real estate as possible, so we built small sets, and stitched everything up afterwards on the computer. 

green screen test

green screen supreme

                                                                                                                                                                     
                                  
 animation of the scenes:
The animation was shot in two different locations, so everything had to match precisely.
Because of the amount of action that the characters were planned to do, we used dfferent rigs and pulleys to allow them to jump, fall, run... and for most cases, die.
here is an example of a rig we did for the bears falling:

rigging setup

I will elaborate further on...

Adding Avital's hand was mostly chinese torture (for him), as he sat under the set for a whole day with his arm up. We animated his hand just like a puppet.

Avital sticking his hand were he shouldn't

And of course, the bugs. Those were a true bet. It was one of the first ideas we had, and the last thing to be shot. The real challenge was to collect all of them. Afterwards, all we did was set them free on set and hope they would do what we wanted them to do. Fortunately, the bugs were a lot more disciplined than live actors, and they eventually did everything we wanted and expected. We just had to shoot a ton of footage and edit it to our liking.

I will talk a lot more about how we did it, and show some off the scenes carnage in a dedicated post.

With all of the footage shot, It was postprodution time. It took roughly the same amount of time to composite everything and add the special effects as it took to shoot the whole thing. I will elaborate on that on  the future.

Well, that's about it for starters. I will write about all of the stages in depth, but feel free to suggest topics and ask questions....

Until then, See yah!