Synopsis

“Ruins” centers around the theme of corruption, compulsion and revenge, as we see the characters slowly intoxicated by their own greed, ultimately leading to their own destruction and their lives left in Ruins.

Directors statement

“We are the sun, the sanctity, and the fight. All of these masters fall away tonight," this song is unrelentingly empowering and we wanted to show that through an older but all too familiar era.The whole time shooting this, Steven and myself were just floored. It's an almost ethereal feeling when you have something so specific in your mind and then you see it on screen. That's by no means how every project goes but we found ourselves experiencing that feeling a lot on this set.

When Dan came to us about this concept initially, we sort of knew right away the vibe we were going for with the visuals but didn’t exactly know the vehicle that was going to drive it. Dan briefly mentioned he was interested in a concept revolving around some sort of ‘Angel of Death’ so we bounced that idea around a bit until Steven remembered a nightmare he had a couple weeks prior. His nightmare consisted of a creature not too far off from the one we see in the film, a large gaping circular mouth with arms twice the length of its own body dragging on the floor, black ooze falling from its mouth. “It was just standing in this spotlit room, slowly breathing and watching every single one of my movements'', he said. We decided to use that to carry the concept of capitalist greed and corruption.

So we had our creature, our next step was figuring out what it’s supposed to be doing and where. We started looking at a lot of old colonial and renaissance era paintings for inspiration, mostly romanticism style stuff. We really liked the idea of recreating that look, so with a limited budget we decided we would actually build three walls in a warehouse, wallpaper it and art it ourselves and rent some old antique furniture that would fit the aesthetic.

One of the biggest challenges of this project was trying to create a convincing space from scratch on top of a mostly functional prosthetic creature in a completely different era on a very small scale. We really could not have accomplished the scope of this project without a lot of very talented and trusted friends wearing many different hats. This video was so damn ambitious considering what we had. We can't thank our crew enough for being so willing to put in some long days to get this thing done. Not once was there a bad attitude on set, not even after hour 16. It was an incredibly collaborative and comfortable space for everyone involved and really the only way to get the best possible work.

This was also the first time we've had to do some hands-off shooting so a huge thank you to the production team at Dark Fable Media in the UK. They did a fantastic job getting us the greenscreen shots of the artist's performances. Lastly, one GIGANTIC thank you to Anna Thaney at Shade of Face FX for pulling off such a chilling creature in a very tight turn around and doing it with such precision, you nailed it.