Photo Credit Marv Watson
Over the past 35 years Anthrax has proven to be one of the most successful bands to be born from the ‘80s “thrash metal” era. Over the past decades they have sold over 10 million records worldwide including classic albums like Among the Living and Persistence of Time. Evolving their music style, Anthrax has branched out and recorded songs with bands like KISS and Public enemy even working with director John Carpenter on the score for his film Ghosts of Mars.
Anthrax is coming back hard with their new single, “A Monster at the End,” from their latest album For All Kings. The single’s new video is product of Anthrax teaming up with director Jack Bennett for a new vision of shooting entirely with Super Sharp HD video still cameras showing off animation, stop motion, rotoscoping, and of course making sure to give a unique experience. Fangoria is proud to premiere the official music video and an exclusive chat with Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante.
Originally the concept was to have four still photographers placed strategically on a Florida set while the five members perform their single live. Each photographer holds down the camera shutter button continuously to create a steady stream of still images. The director Bennett’s goal was to create an animated staccato feel to the flow of the images. He went through each footage frame by frame and hand picked the images he wanted to animate and was able to create the still images with a jagged motion making it look much like a flipbook animation. Each of the band members had their individual movements captured to accentuate the power of them playing like drummer Charlie Benante’s drum hits or Scott Ian’s strumming or Frank Bello’s rhythm.
Taking this music video to the nest level, Bennett used a technique known as rotoscoping, which is the art of hand painting individual cells to embellish a primary image. He was then able to accent the video with monsters, tattoos coming alive, explosions, popping eyeballs, speech bubbles, morphed images and nods to the influence of Creepshow. As the video evolves the frame rate increase giving the band members more fluid movements until at the end Bennett wraps up the video with one or more surprise revealing the true monster that lies in all of us. The video captures your attention and truly gives you the feel that you are making your way through a comic book. This new single holds true to the nature of Anthrax keeping thrash metal alive.
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