Behind The Scenes: Djentrified - Welcome To The Abyss (Official Video)

The Welcome to the Abyss video was an extremely low-budget DIY project that I directed, shot, and edited. Then, my partner Sami (a talented concert/music photographer in their own right) made sure the shots that I had to be in front of the camera for were in focus and framed up well. I was also lucky to have the help of another friend for some of the CG sequences (with the 3D figures).

The idea behind the video came from a slow, painful drain of empathy that seems to be happening to all of us, everywhere, for quite some time.

It feels like we’ve been exposed to so much tragedy and trauma at this point - from the constant barrage of school/mass shooting events (Colombine happened the same year I was born) to unchecked and violent racism, to genocides that fall on deaf ears and empty hearts. It’s started to rewire us at our core.

I really wanted to capture it from an empathetic stance of, "I understand because I feel it too."

Everything in the music video, the visuals, the pacing, the colours (and lack thereof), was intentional.

Every shot of me surrounded by total blackness is a representation of "the abyss." The mental and emotional void that society has been spiralling into. I intercut it with footage of the real-world tragedies we've been subjected to (going beyond, even, mass shootings and genocide to people kidnapped off the street, police brutality, 9/11, Tiananmen Square, Kent State, all the way back to the Vietnam War when war really first started being mass-broadcasted), as well as calling out the people and systems behind them. With the evolution of mass media, we’ve witnessed these tragedies and traumas over and over again, and each time it chips away at us.

I made the 3D figures to serve as a visual metaphor for that fragility. Cracking and coming apart at the seams from constant exposure and the weight it bears down on us. I wanted to capture that uncanny valley between human and not, and capture that feeling of losing our humanity through it all.

There are also moments of “zoochosis” (a condition where animals start repetitively pacing or harming themselves), along with the “ant death spiral,” where ants follow each other in circles until they all die off.

I wanted to draw those parallels to our society, our own death spiral, all the way down to the arrangement of the music itself. For example, I put a specific moment in the song (at 3:41) where the arrangement literally "spirals" down, with the same riff gradually shortening more and more each time it's played.

At the end of the video, the black liquid pouring from my mouth represents the plague of apathy taking over. It's an illness that rots one from the inside out, and it must be fought. Now is not the time to take the path of least resistance.

It’s not meant to be an enjoyable video. It’s an uncomfortable and disturbing watch, as it should be. It’s meant to be raw and real, to really face what’s happening to us. But it’s also a hand reaching out and saying, “I see you. But we can’t stay here. We have to feel again. We have to care.”