Video premiere: The Velopheliacs, ‘Jupiter’

Kevin Bronson on August 12th, 2016

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The Velopheliacs (Photo by Andrew Harless)

L.A. duo the Velopheliacs play softly but carry big concepts. On their “The Sun Through Mars” EP, released in April, Dylan Wright and Syd Everatt weave fables around the sun, moon, planets and the gods for which they’re named, all in a celestially twinkling style they cal “post-folk.” The musical poem “Jupiter,” like the planet, is a big song, but not one “of a singular meaning,” Wright says. “The video we made for it focuses on a particular fraction, the friction of transformation or change. ‘Jupiter’ in parts represents conflict and simultaneous resignation and resolution, the fight in the video is sparks left behind in the wake of the rub against stagnation.”

That fight is “one badass, dream-like, knight battle,” says the video’s director, Kelly Reed. It stars Randal Scott and Michael Moody, two guys with a deep background in armor, combat, fight choreography and weapons. Filmed by Jay Carey in downtown’s Mystery Box Theater (on a sweltering day, with no air conditioning), the duelists battle to the finish. “Working through that fight sequence was the hardest and most rewarding part of this whole video,” Reed says. “A large part of the video is made up of in camera effects created by prisms and clear globes. Syd and Dylan early on emphasized the importance of limiting the audiences view of one of the knights. We used the prisms and the clear globes to create an in camera distortion. It gave it this dream quality that the video needed.”

||| Watch: The video for “Jupiter”