There's a kind of shoot that completely wrecks you physically, but the shots you get simply can't be captured anywhere else. The second music video for the Varaždin band Häxänking was exactly that kind of experience.

The main location was an old historic fortress on a steep hill near Varaždin, completely surrounded by dense forest. Visually it's the perfect backdrop for the epic, dark atmosphere of their music, but logistically it was a serious creative and physical test. The band and the whole crew carried all the gear up the hill on foot, including a full drum kit. No lift, no road for cars, just a steep climb and a ruthless selection of what you really need on set.

That particular feeling, when the whole crew carries heavy instruments through the forest without a single complaint because they truly believe in the project, ends up invisibly transferring to the screen. It's hard to explain rationally, but that raw energy and shared effort simply radiate from the final shots.

Performance energy and monumental width

Unlike the first video, this project didn't have a complex narrative. The focus was purely on energy. It was a performance video (performance-based video) with the band playing at its centre, the wild surroundings breathing around them and a camera constantly searching for the perfect moment. That kind of shoot demands a completely different presence behind the lens. There's no strict script holding your hand, just your instinct and the rhythm of the music, and you have to be faster than the moment to catch the right expression.

To give the story complete aesthetic closure, we decided to enrich the fortress footage with epic aerial shots of rugged cliffs in the wider area. My colleague Petar Krajačić Vilović, an experienced visual artist and professional video producer, brought that essential, monumental dimension from above. The breadth of the landscape, the dramatic vertical of the cliffs and the open exterior gave the footage a scale that a ground camera alone could never achieve. When I joined those two visual parts in the edit, the story made complete sense.

Modern metal meets 1938 film avant-garde

What stayed with me most from the whole post-production was one bold editing experiment. While selecting material, we decided to cut in legendary shots from “Alexander Nevsky”, the 1938 film by the famous director Sergei Eisenstein. On paper, the black-and-white monumental aesthetic and historical masses on the ice might sound incompatible with a modern music video. On screen, though, it works flawlessly, mainly because of the specific visual identity we gave the whole video.

The entire video is black and white, but with one striking, dramatic contrast. Using colour selection we isolated red. All the footage is monochrome, but the blood on the band members' bodies and everything carrying elements of blood kept its bright, raw red. When our visual concept meets Eisenstein's black-and-white signature at exactly the right rhythmic moment, the cut becomes invisible. The viewer doesn't see a technical break; they feel pure aesthetic and historical weight. And that was the point of the whole project: to create something that goes beyond the usual limits of the genre.

If you need professional music video production, video work or stylised colour grading for your next project in Varaždin and the surrounding area, get in touch and let's take your story to a cinematic level together.