Behind The Scenes: Siege Perilous - As the Dragon Falls (Official Video)

The music video idea started with a fundamental question, which was “How do we put Guest Fabio Lione into a music video together when scheduling and budgetary constraints meant that filming a traditional music video together would be impossible?” So I thought it would be fun to do an animation in the style of a medieval manuscript. There were a few different reasons I wanted to go for this particular style. Firstly, I'm a little obsessed with this art style. I’m a history teacher and also have done documentaries where I got to film and handle a lot of the real medieval illuminated manuscripts, and I find it so interesting. Additionally, from an art and animation standpoint, the simplistic designs meant that it was doable with what I would describe as my middling level of skill at both of those things. But since the result was meant to look a little Monty Python or even maybe a little South Park-esque, I felt like there was a reasonable chance of success.

So the next phase was putting together the assets. I had to make the figures, draw/make different hand shapes (which got especially interesting for our guitarists), make sure I had all the different phonemes (mouth shapes), and background plates. I also realized that for at least my character and the drago,n I needed multiple angles, which was really tough. This alone was probably 20 hours or so of work (though I'm sure a drawing and animation pro could have done it much faster).

The next phase was to build the character animations. I used Adobe Character Animator. It had been a while since I had used the program, so I had to re-learn how to rig the character,s so that was definitely a time-consuming part of the process. Once that was done, I started by lip-syncing the parts. There is a cool feature in the program that will record you using a webcam and basically do facial motion capture for the lips, eyebrows, etc. Then you go in and do a little correction. After that, I would do the body animations. There's a good kind of rag doll animation type feature in Character Animator, and then I would use hot keys to switch hand shapes for the guitarists to make it look like they were playing in time with the song.

Once I had the character animations sorted out, I went into After Effects to build the rest. I used some graphic templates from Envato Elements (I also use them for the stock footage I use for our cinematic lyric videos) for the opening/closing book animations and some of the scrolls. I also did in this section the animation for things like the dragon flying and when it's the dragon singing (rather than human Fabio Lione). I think the hardest clip here was the “blood-stained skies,” as I had to try to generate blood particles that looked good, which was challenging.

After the first draft of the video, it was clear that something wasn't quite working. I tried to keep it very 2D to get across the medieval manuscript idea, but sometimes you have to pivot, so I took a lot of the clips, especially the “performance” section, and utilized 3d camera movement to give it a bit more dynamism. I then did some layering work to give it an aged parchment kind of look, which also helped hide some of the flaws in the animation.

Overall, I'm really happy with the way the video turned out. I wanted to create something unique to commemorate what to me is a very special collaboration with Fabio Lione because he's one of the first voices that pulled me into heavy metal/power metal when I was a teenager.