Pumpkin Man

Music video for Kate Arnold's unique cover of Spear of Destiny's Pumpkin Man.

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I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with Kate Arnold again. I really enjoyed this cover and wanted to do the song justice with the video I made for it.

My approach for the song was to try to picture myself in the character’s head. Listening to the lyrics conjures up the image of this person out at night, completely drunk and getting caught up in a violent end by clashing with the police. Undertones of difficult life circumstances, repressed emotions, police brutality speak out loudly with this song. I wanted to express this sense of sensory overload and as such being limited to what the character could perceive. I experimented with this in a number of ways but eventually settled on having this constant interruption of vision through using a responsive audio spectrum which would simultaneously reveal and hide the action.

I didn’t want to illustrate the lyrics but I wanted to allude to them and create an atmosphere. As such my choice of shots were interpretations of the song's meaning that I imagined a wider context for. As I was telling this story I was also mapping a visual language to the recurrent sounds in the music. I expanded on this idea of sensory overload and the disruption of the senses so that certain sounds distorted and affected the video in ways that started playing with the pixels and the medium itself. The strings became a sound that would pull at the video and make it harder to see. The booming of a drum became an explosive vibration that scattered the pixels. As I worked on the video, I felt more and more like I was sculpting with the pixels to create a form that was ever changing. I hope that the form I ended up creating reflects and in some way captures the core of this beautiful song.