SÓLSTAFIR – Take You On A Special Trip With “Blakkrakki”
SÓLSTAFIR – Take You On A Special Trip With “Blakkrakki”
SÓLSTAFIR, meaning "crepuscular rays" in Icelandic, refers to those piercing rays of sunlight that break through dark clouds at dusk. This imagery perfectly captures the essence of their upcoming album, “Hin helga kvöl”, a beacon of light and hope shining through the heaviest of times. As the band confronts their inner demons, shrugging off the trappings of Rock and Roll decadence, their music resonates with the universal struggle and triumph over hardship. “Hin helga kvöl” is the holy war that we all face within.
Their latest single and video, “Blakkrakki” ( = “Black Dog”) deals with a similar subject: the black dog as a metaphor that has its origin in myth and folklore. Likewise, the new video for “Blakkrakki” literally transfers the meaning of those rays of sunlight breaking through twilight into a wild ride: View the video
Bowen Staines, Director for Don’t Panic Films, is shedding some light (beams) on the production of the video: “Regarding the production of the new music video for ‘Blakkrakki’, this is actually the fifth video I’ve been lucky enough to do with SÓLSTAFIR. This particular idea for a future video (which would ultimately become “Blakkrakki”) came to Addi and I maybe four or five years ago, when we discussed the possibility of putting everybody on a flatbed trailer, and then just drifting the thing around the runways at the Reykjavík Airport and shooting the whole thing in a single take.
And so we put that idea onto the shelf for a few years until I heard a very early demo for ‘Blakkrakki’ almost four years ago at SÓLSTAFIR’s rehearsal space in Seltjarnarnes, the same day I asked them to learn ‘Dionysus’ at three-times the normal speed for the video we’d shoot for that song the next day. And I remember looking at Addi, and being like “I want to do THIS one!”… Four years later (but also, only a few weeks ago), the guys were playing the song while standing on a flatbed trailer doing sixty miles per hour on a stretch of highway surrounded on all sides by one of the oldest lava flows in Iceland.
From a filmmaking standpoint, I opted to include shots that revealed the cameras, crew and our driver, Lexi, because I felt that it was really important to share that part of the process, as well as the teamwork that made this video happen in a single day. By comparison, both ‘Fjara’ and ‘Bláfjall’ had 60+ pages of shotlists, took nearly four months to shoot, and then another five or six months to edit… while ‘Blakkrakki’ was shot in a single day, and then edited over the following twenty-one — making this the fastest I have ever shot and edited a music video in my entire career. All of the camera movements and transitions were done 100% in-camera: there are no key-frames, digital fades or any motion paths, and as such, almost zero post-production.
The most fun part of shooting the video was that everything was done totally guerrilla-style: active roads and highways, with the only items consistently strapped down being the cabs, amp heads, and the priceless Ludwig drumkit from 1963 that we BORROWED from a personal friend of the band… ‘Careful’ just doesn’t quite say it. Thankfully, the only thing that eventually/inevitably fell off was one of the Orange amp heads and one of Hallgrímur’s drumsticks, for which he had to run all the way back to find amongst the infinite expanses of highway, moss and lava far behind us.
That being said, there was a point after we had done a dozen or so takes and had gotten comfortable with everyone being on the flatbed, where we found our way onto this huge stretch of road called Keilir and began hitting speeds upwards of fifty to sixty miles per hour — and every time a large truck passed us, you can actually see some of the cymbals flexing in a few of the shots that made it into the final video — as well as a couple really quick clips of some of us almost falling off the side while going up a steep switchback incline near Þingvellir. The final step was to transfer the whole video onto Super16mm film, so that it has a very organic, weighty feel to it. So yeah, this whole video was transferred directly onto reel-to-reel 16mm film, proving once again that the format is NOT dead! All in all, ‘Blakkrakki’ was a blast to make, and we hope you have fun watching it, too.”
