About a year and a half ago I was walking around in the the toys isle of Walgreen’s when all of a sudden this awesome idea popped into my head: Violin Hero music video! I wasn’t sure how to do it but I really wanted to make this video. It would need green screen and animation and those are two things that I knew absolutely nothing about, so I started looking around for directors. I have a lot of friends who make films because I have worked for them as a composer. I talked to a handful of people who seemed interested, but then I found Zzalgern0n (as far as I can tell that actually IS his name – one name, like “McLovin.”)

Not only is Zzalgern0n an awesome, hi-energy, internet-savvy director, experienced with both green screen and animations; he has also beat Guitar Hero on Expert! It was clear that this was the man for the job:

Pre-production

There was quite a bit of pre-production on this project. Comic-book artist Brandon Redenius designed a Violin Hero logo and box. Zzalgern0n made a disc. My girlfriend Laura Weinbach from Foxtails Brigade made illustrations for the start screen and song-select screen. For the song-select screen we also consulted with musicologist Baker Peeples to come up with a list of the most shredding violin songs of all time in ascending order of difficulty.

Trisha Gum, who made the clay sculptures for Dark Opus now works making miniature sets for stop-motion tv shows on cartoon network. She built a miniature set for this video out of mostly cardboard and paper:

Production

Zzalgern0n wrote a very ambitious treatment for this video which included locations like Egypt, Japan and Hell. Obviously it was out of our budget to film on location, so we had to do what we could with the magic of special effects. On the first day of filming we built a sweet makeshift green screen in Lewis’ old bedroom at our parents’ house, where we filmed some violin students (thanks Keith and Sierra!) After that we went over to a couple of our aunts’ houses and filmed our cousins there. Lewis and I have 25 cousins of all different ages on our mom’s side (I am the oldest), and we have been making movies with them since we were little kids. It was awesome to carry on that tradition in this video!

For the band footage we went to LA, where Zzalgern0n’s friend donated the use of a real green screen studio. It was super fancy with all kinds of different lighting tools. I couldn’t believe that we got to use that place…. so awesome! Rebecca Fierro did costumes and makeup:

After that, Zzalger0n wrapped up the rest of the filming on his own in LA. He got a ton of awesome people to be in the video. Watch for hilarious cameos from:

Paul Rust (I Love You Beth Cooper)
Matt Braunger
Josh Fadem (30 Rock)
Josh Perry (Retarded Policeman)
BJ Averell (winner of The Amazing Race)
Matt Cornell (Extreme Elvis)

Post Production

This is where the real fun began. Zzalgern0n had literally hours of footage to condense into a 3-minute video. This was truly a monstrous task, but he did it! The final step was animation. For this we turned to Mike Mayfield (The Cleveland Show). To help him out, I did a colored transcription of the Cobra Strike cello part:

see how that works?

________________________

Monday!

We premiered the video last weekend in LA and the response was off the Richter Scale! It’s going up on YouTube on Monday, February 1st and when that happens we need all of your help posting it everywhere! Here are some tips for posting:

-Join the Posting Day event on Facebook – http://tinyurl.com/postingday

-Post a link in your Facebook or Myspace status

-Post the link on Twitter and (if you’re into this kind of thing) call it #ViolinHero

- Email a link around your office or school or any kind of club you are in

Forums and Blogs:
If you have a blog or you post regularly on a forum, post a link there. If you really want to help us out, you could even sign up for some new forums and post there. These are the kind of sites that would be good:

-Band forums: metal bands, experimental bands, indie rock bands, classical composers anything!

-Music Blogs: again, any genre

-Sites that Post Amusing Videos: Digg, VideoSift, Fark, BestofYouTube etc

-Video Game Forums and Blogs: after all, this is a guitar hero spoof

-Comedy Forums and Blogs: We have so many awesome comedian cameos in this. Comedy fans will be interested.

-Any Other Topic You Can Think Of!

We worked on this video and we would love for as many people to see it as possible. With your help, we will make that happen. Thank you!

-anton

Our new record is coming out Tuesday, April 13th on itunes, Rhapsody, and every other possible digital music service that we can think of. It will also be coming out as a very special Collectors Book / CD, which will be available at our shows.  We are extremely proud of the record and very excited to share it with you guys. It’s called Peacocks / Pink Monsters.

We’re releasing it 100% independently, which means we’re counting on all of you guys; our friends and our fans to help spread the word! There are a bunch of cool things that doing to prepare for the release:

Posting Day! First Single and Music Video!

On February 1st, we are releasing the first single from the record entitled “Cobra Strike” as a digital download and YouTube music video. The video is AWESOME. I think it might be one of the coolest things we’ve ever done and I think people are really going to like it, and really like the song.

HERE’S WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU:
On the day that the video comes out we need everyone to POST THE SHIT OUT OF IT!  Post it on your Facebook feed! Post it on your Twitter! Post it to everyone in your office and everyone at your school and everyone in your family! Post it on every blog and every forum you can think of!

HERE’S WHAT YOU GET:
In exchange for your help we’re going to make Cobra Strike a FREE DOWNLOAD for the whole day on posting day, and for a couple of days afterward. We’ll post the download link on this Facebook Event and update everyone who has RSVP’d as “Attending” with the URL. This way all of our real fans and friends can get the song for free with some bonus material and anyone who discovers Judgement Day later from the video will just have to buy the regular download from our music page http://stringmetal.com/judgementday/music .

WHAT’S THIS VIDEO ABOUT ANYWAY?
It’s CRAZY! It’s RIDICULOUS! I’m not going to tell you everything about it right away because I want you to guess. (If you already know please don’t spill the beans!) Instead, I’m going to give you hints. You should all recruit people to the Facebook Event, and for every 25 new Attendees that we get there, I will post one new picture and/or hint about the video or the new record.

US TOUR!

We just started booking a record release tour, which begins on March 11th. Booking is going pretty well so far but we could definitely use some tips about cool bands to play with and cool clubs to play at, especially on the east coast. Check out the tour routing at http://stringmetal.com/judgementday/tour and if you have any ideas, please email us at judgmentdayband@yahoo.com

SHOWS THIS MONTH:
LA and San Francisco

Sun. 1/24
Los Angeles
Cinespace
Cobra Strike video release party. Free admission and free vodka until 10:30.
9:30 pm / 21+ / FREE until 10:30

Sat. 1/30
San Francisco
Bottom of the Hill (Winter Music Festival)
Presented by SF Indiefest and Talking House Records with BATTLEHOOCH and the Hot Moon
9pm / All Ages / $8

Alright! This is going to be fun!

-anton

Here is a video of all of the best footage I filmed on our trip. I think it is a pretty good representation of our tour:

Germany

As soon as we hit Germany,  our casual European vacation turned into a full-on, epic rock tour. Dredg are heroes in Germany, and every night we played to over 1000 people. This was definitely the biggest week in Judgement Day’s life so far, and it went incredibly well. For all of the German shows we were also joined by another cool band called The Parlor Mob, from New Jersey. They fit perfectly into the bill with excellent musicianship and a sound vaguely reminiscent of classic Led Zeppelin. They seemed to be excited about our band as well. Their sound engineer Tony liked us so much that he ended up doing our sound for free, which made a huge difference for us.

The Prank

A few days before our show in Berlin, Dredg got a memo from the Berlin police department saying that they were looking for “Dradg” for questioning about some “property damage”.  Everyone in the band got really paranoid, so Drew Roulette (bass player) came up with a brilliant prank:

On the night of the Berlin show, he hired 2 actors to dress up like German police, come on stage in the middle of the set and arrest Gavin and Dino (singer and drummer)! It worked perfectly: Gavin and Dino were scared shitless!

Drew wanted all of the fans to think that the arrest was real for the first few days, so after the show we posted this video, which cuts off just before the prank is revealed:

Three days later we posted the full, uncut version:

Last Three Shows

Our last big German show was in Hamburg, which is a total party town. It’s kind of like the German Las Vegas: there are tons of bars and clubs, and gambling and prostitution are legal. There are transvestites and prostitutes walking around everywhere and sometimes they try to grab you. Lewis, Drew and I walked down the main prostitute street to check out the craziness and it was interesting. The clubs in Hamburg stay open all night so we celebrated our tour properly, drinking and dancing until 5am.

Two days later we played in Christiania, an anarchist commune town in the middle of Copenhagen where drugs are legal. The club there was awesome. It looked like a viking tavern – totally metal. The crowd was small so we decided it would be a good opportunity to practice for the Dark Opus 5th Anniversary show. We played Dark Opus all of the way through and it went way better than any of us thought it would. We got an awesome review from that show; one of the best live reviews we’ve ever gotten. You can read it here but it might give away a couple of surprises for this Thursday’s show.

The last show was in London, a city that I love. We played one of our best sets of the tour and the next day we flew home.

Summing it all up…

My friend let me borrow a Flip video camera for this trip, and I did my best to film cool stuff with it. I edited all of the footage together into a music video that I think sums up our tour well. Here it is – my official Dark Opus video for Pitfires of Hell:

HERE’S HOW IT WORKS:

_________________________________________

FLIGHT II

FINIS OMNE (grand finale!)

Watch all of the Dark Opus music videos on our Youtube Page

It is hard to believe that it has been 5 years since we released Dark Opus but come mid November it will be truth – our first foray into violin, cello and drums string metal will be half a decade old. We have a new record coming out early next year, which means we probably won’t be playing many Dark Opus songs live at our shows anymore. We don’t want to forget about our first record though, so instead or retiring it we’re going give it a proper celebration by posting music videos for every song. We will be releasing a couple of videos a week for the next month or so and they will all be available on our Youtube page and on our blog. We think this is super cool for 2 reasons:

1. Every song will now have sweet visuals by different artists.

2. You will be able to watch the entire record for free on Youtube.

On November 19th, after all of the videos have been posted, we are going to have a big Dark Opus 5th Anniversary and video release party at Annie’s Social Club in San Francisco, where we will play the whole album straight through and project all of the videos as we go. Booya!

Here are the first two videos:

INTERLUDE & INFERNO

An energetic edit of live footage filmed at Cafe Pergolesi in Santa Cruz, CA in 2005
Directed and Edited by Dave Kluger. Shot by Dave Kluger, Sam Bolleto, Andrew Keating.

REVELATIONS

A collage of found video footage, passed through digital filters.
By Luke Judd

We made a sweet animated flier for our show at Thee Parkside on Thursday. Thanks to Ting for the concept. Check it out:

If you want to see it with sound and music by the main support band Wendy Darling watch the youtube version:

The video is up! The premier last night at Madrone was great. Thanks to everyone who came out. I hope that you had as much fun as we did. Here it is:

=

Help us out. Vote for this video on the following sites:
DIGG IT
REDIT
__________________

Crew Credits:
Director: Travis Jones
Special Effects and Editing: Adam Rygiol
Cinematography: Dustin DeVoy
Camera Operator: Charlie
Producer: Anton Patzner

Zombies:
Adam Davis
Joe Anderson
AJ Juncker
Alicia Marie Campbell
Colin Buckley
Garrett Grant
Max Rygiol
Clara Voigt

I just saw a close-to-final cut of our music video for “Out of the Abyss” and I have to say, all of our hard work has paid off. The zombies are totally frightening and we do an awesome job of destroying them with our rock. I’m really excited to put it out and I think that people are really going to like it. So I thought I should maybe explain a little bit about what we went through to make the video happen.

---

The guys in charge were Travis Jones and Adam Rygiol, both recent graduates of the San Francisco State film program. Travis’s original idea for the video involved mythical birds, magic teleportation worm holes and one scene with three helicopters. Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford to make that one. Since we are all poor and paying for it ourselves, I thought we should try to keep the budget to around $200. Travis came up with a new idea: Zombies. It was perfect. You really can’t go wrong with Zombies, plus Travis and Adam are total experts. Adam is currently on a mission to watch every zombie movie ever made… That’s serious dedication. I personally think I would probably have trouble sitting through 5 minutes of “Zombie 4 – After Death” (although “Zombie Vs Ninja” sounds like it could be pretty cool).

We found a great location to shoot the video: the basement of It’s a Grind, a sweet coffee shop on Nob Hill. The owner was really into the video and was totally supportive. The basement itself was dark, dusty and completely epic. Perfect.

I called a bunch of friends to see if they would want to come and be zombies for it and everyone that I talked to was super into doing it. The only requirement that we had was that everyone involved with the video had to have seen “Night of the Living Dead”. I actually had never seen it myself. It’s pretty sweet and it’s public domain, which means you can stream it for free if you want.

Finally the weekend of shooting arrived. The first day was mostly just shooting the band. Travis had this idea to cover us in baby powder in between every shot so that there would always be dust flying everywhere. We went through a whole bottle of baby powder on the first day alone and I’d say that about 80% of it probably ended up in our lungs. We had to take breaks every 30 minutes or so to go upstairs and get air and I couldn’t help but notice the patrons of the coffee shop staring at us as we came out of the basement in costume and make-up, covered in baby powder. Whatever. It was nothing compared to what they’d be seeing on Sunday.

Sunday was Zombie Day. Everyone came with their own costumes and our friend Alicia Campbell handled the make-up. We had some dope-looking zombies including a bearded zombie, a hole-in-the-head zombie, a dangling-arm zombie, and bride and groom zombies. For blood, since the video is black and white, we used the old chocolate syrup trick, the same trick Alfred Hitchcock used for the shower scene in Psycho. Since we used up our whole bottle of baby powder on Band Day, Travis brought two bottles for Zombie Day and in case you didn’t know, chocolate sauce + baby powder = big sticky mess. Our trips up to the coffee shop that day were much funnier than the first day. Our friends were all nonchalantly ordering coffee in full zombie make-up with chocolate sauce dripping down their faces. It was pretty bad-ass.

Finally, after a a few hours of zombie moshing and a few more hours of throwing bloody limbs around, we were done. It was a good two days of hard work but I think it was totally worth it. Hopefully everyone else who worked on it feels the same way. I can’t wait to show it to everyone.

-Anton

The video premier party is:
Wednesday, Nov. 28th at Madrone
500 Divisadero St. (@ Fell)
9 pm, 21+, $5
with performances by DJ’s Nick and Ant, Hippie Grenade and Judgement Day

If you want to see Riki Feldmann’s epic photo’s from the shoot you can find them HERE

What kind of zombie would you be?