Making People Vomit Black Bile: Over a Decade of Filming Metal Music Videos.
- Jack Maguire
- Mar 15
- 5 min read
Imagine this: you board a train with a bunch of luggage bags. These bags contain various cameras, lenses, lights and other video-making tools. This is a collection of useful items you’ve built up over the years and is collectively worth over a grand. This is all happening whilst you are fighting a stomach ache. And now that stomach ache has become the urge to vomit on the train. And then it happens: you vomit on the train.
This happened to me on the way to a music video shoot I had agreed to do. I ate something the night before that was bad. But I couldn’t turn around because I was sick. This project came with weeks of planning and organizing band members, actors, a make-up artist and a studio to film the band in. A project where I was solely responsible for filming and later editing. No pressure, right?
This incident occured in 2017. By this point, I was making music videos for bands for 8 years. It’s the longest side hustle I’ve maintained to this day. I suppose it was a way to justify my otherwise useless Media degrees. But more importantly, it was a way to contribute to my local heavy music scene a bit differently than just playing in a band. What started as filming buddies in abandoned houses, it then progressed into filming festivals.
I now have a reliable list of re-occurring clients, as well as old friends that still want to demonstrate the filthiest breakdowns. I also have a nice little space here on this site. And I will attempt to use it to pen down a side of the music business not many people see. The process that exists well before a video is uploaded to YouTube and social media sites.
Mise En Scene
There’s a phrase I was taught in college called Mise en Scene. It's French for ‘what's on screen.’ I learned quite early on that it wasn’t always about what you film with, it was simply what you film. Think of all the amateur videos you've seen that went viral. Chances are most of them were shot on phones. In the case of filming music videos, half the battle is just showing up with a camera.
Even on shoestring budgets, the videos I shot were always team efforts with myself and the band. We would often have to pool our resources to find locations to film at. Or find willing friends to be actors in our little horror show. This also included preparing cheap props if there was a storyline within the video. This meant lots of fake blood and LOTS OF BLACK MOLLASIS FOR VOMITTING.
Because I came from a sort of film-school background, we were encouraged to imitate what we saw on popular movies. In many of the metal music videos I made, conventions you would see in Hollywood horror films made their way in. In these instances, communication was essential. The more complex a shoot became, the more detailed the planning. Because it's a work of art you are doing for someone else, it's a process of getting in their heads of what they are after.
I would often mentally map out the types of shots I wanted the get if I knew the location. However, I didn’t always have the luxury of pre-planning everything. For example, previous projects involved capturing band footage from a live gig they were playing. But no matter the situation, one thing remained consistent: getting those money shots.
The true objective was getting those killer shots. The shots that imitated cinema at times. The moving images that stood out and were distinctive. They could be as beautiful as the actress we had running through the woods, to as ugly as the actress we had vomit black bile. Shots that look good even when you freeze-frame them (like the stills seen above). Keep this in mind should you choose to go down a similar road.
Children of Technology
Between the 1980’s and the 2000’s, the music video medium was only relegated to TV and certain corners on the internet much later. Then the game changed in 2006 when YouTube launched and quickly grew in popularity. However, uploading videos wasn't always straightforward back then. In the 2000’s, nearly every camera was using the medium of DV tapes. I do not miss those things. They were analogue in nature, and very time consuming to capture footage from onto a computer.
It wasn’t until the 2010’s that the process got much more streamlined. You had the first DSLR (digital single lens reflex) cameras that shot 1080p video. They only required SD cards to shoot on. Much easier than tapes. I still have my Canon 550d I bought back in 2012. And by this point, support for uploading 1080p videos had become much easier.
While my musician friends were drooling over their next guitar, I was eyeballing different lenses for my camera. The lenses themselves provided different visual options for what was on screen. Any photographer will tell you the same. For anyone curious, the lenses I used varied between 50mm, 24-70mm, and an 8mm fisheye lens. But no matter what was used, the objective was the same: to try and get that shot not many others could pull off.
A Niche Market
Like most of you here viewing this site: you like your music brutal. Well so do I. It has been that way since my late teens. For some of us, it was never enough to consume the music. Some of us felt we needed to contribute back. That included learning instruments. For others, it meant using existing talents to put towards a local metal/hardcore scene. In this case, I’m speaking to all the photographers, illustrators, videographers, editors and various visual artists.
By the time I was knee deep in CD’s, I was already learning about cameras and video editing software. Somewhere along the way, I decided I would be useful and bring a video camera to my local show. After that, many people wanted to see the footage after it was all said and done. Keep in mind I started this in 2004, before smartphones and social media. However, the logic is still the same. There's a good chance that the band you recorded wants to watch that footage back. And that’s where the networking begins. As I wrote earlier in this article, half the battle is showing up with a camera. Winning is successfully recording the footage and capturing as much as you can.
Describing how to succeed at a visual medium is difficult. It first starts with even a slight passion for what you are doing. My advice to anyone looking to lend their talents to your local scene is to show up, take photos, videos, draw flyers for said show, etc. And start cheap, maybe even for free to begin with. From there, a repour can be built. And learn from fuck-ups and failures instead of being discouraged. As the more niche the music genre, the more likely you are going to run into the same faces. And you never know when those faces ask for your help.
If you've made it this far, I will now reward you with some of the videos mentioned in this article. Some things are better shown than said.
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