Anthrax has released the official video for ‘A Monster At The End’, a song from the band’s latest album, For All Kings.
The original concept was to have four still photographers placed strategically on a Florida set while the five of Anthrax performed the song “A Monster At The End” live. Each photographer would hold down his camera’s shutter button continuously for the near-four minute-long song, capturing a steady stream of hundreds of still images.
“Hey, it might have been a great idea,” laughed video director Jack Bennett, “but holding down the shutter button on a still camera for that long a time? All we would have ended up with were four jammed cameras!”
Shooting the entire video with Super Sharp HD video still cameras, Bennett wanted an animated, staccato-feel to the flow of the individual images. “Video shutter speeds are faster and more reliable than anything we could have done manually, and we wanted as big a pool of still images to choose from as we could get.”
In post-production, Bennett went through the footage frame by frame and hand-picked the still images he wanted to animate — hundreds of them. Rather than print the video at 24 frames per second, he animated movement of the band using the still images, creating a jagged, crude motion. “We didn’t want fluidity, we wanted the video to have more of a comic book feel to it, like flipbook animation.”
This also allowed Bennett to hang on the band ’ individual movements to accentuate the power of their playing, such as the strength in Charlie Benante’s drum hits, or Scott Ian’s strumming or Frank Bello’s rhythm.
