Behind The Scenes: Lucid Dementia - Witches Hat (Official Video)

Sheldon the “Puppet Master” from Lucid Dementia: We were getting close to finishing our newest album, “Hexery,” and had finally been rehearsing after about a 3 ½ year hiatus due to the pandemic and a serious illness in the band, and started discussing how we needed to work on releasing a music video for one of the songs on the album. I have been very inspired by how the band Lebanon Hanover comes out with what looks like a lot of simple, low-budget music videos. How, even in their simple state, because of the music and what was going on in the videos, they really held my attention. That and the band The Dream Eaters. I watched those videos and realized it wasn’t as important for a band to throw a bunch of money at a music video with a lot of high production that takes forever to make as it was to just grab whatever was around and work with what we have to get something out. If the music is cool, and what we are doing in the video could be made out to look cool, we could really make something that a lot of people would like. So I talked to the rest of the band, and they agreed to go for it.

I’m a fan of David Lynch, and I really liked some of the imagery from the movie The Ring, as well as some occult-type images that occasionally float around the web. We talked about doing some nighttime filming in a park and other locations, but we really had limited time and energy to get it done, so we went with the simplest solution and shot the band in our rehearsal/ritual studio. The pinhole lighting was somewhat of an accident. I wanted it to be really dark, and I was playing with the video on my phone and a flashlight, and accidentally covered the light on my phone and got that effect for a brief second, then spent days trying different things with different lights to get that down. Shooting those scenes in the dark like that was actually kind of dangerous for our cinematographer, and I feel like that unsteadiness came through in the shots, to even further advance the general creepiness we were going for in it.

A hand grabbing a Halloween witch’s hat would be too literal to the song, and I find the hand grabbing a flower is poetic and disturbing. It looks violent to me. So we went with that. I guess we went pretty literal with the spell-casting scenes, but even then, we kept it pretty vague about what is actually happening in those. I’m pretty sure most people will miss a lot with what is actually going on in that, which is probably for the best. Our longtime band friend Erik Gustafson edited it for us. He’s been in a few other bands and is currently fronting Adoration Destroyed, but he also does music videos and has been wanting to work with us for a while. I had all the trust in the world that he would do something cool. I pretty much just gave him everything we shot, the basic ideas we were going for, and turned him loose on it. He is always great to work with, and I am extremely happy with the work he did.

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