In the last two years, director Phil Mucci has established a distinct style in the music video world, to the point where he has written his own rules on how things get done. Starting with "The Devil's Orchard" by Opeth in 2011, Phil has released a string of dark and colorful rotoscope-animated heavy metal music videos that have made an impact in the music video industry in general, and not just in the heavy metal community. It was after seeing one of Phil’s videos, "Fertile Green" by High On Fire, the band Huntress approached him to collaborate on their next video project, "Zenith," before they had even recorded the song. The result is a UFO filled video that stars Huntress lead singer Jill Janus as a giant Starbound Beast who is able to make destruction look sexy as hell. We talked to both Phil and Jill about working together on the video and each of their contributions to the project.

Doug: In general, what purpose do you think this music video serves Huntress as a band? What kind of value does it offer?

Jill: The obvious purpose for a music video is to gain visibility, to promote your music. However, Huntress and Phil Mucci share a common desire to surpass expectations and never compromise our vision. "Zenith" is part of our legacy. In a world where mediocrity is glorified, we never dumb it down. We destroy it. And we will continue to destroy mediocrity and blaze a new path for true heavy metal. We understand the hard work is never done, I know it will be a difficult journey scattered with small victories. But those small victories keep me fighting for longevity with Huntress. The value is integrity, something Phil and I understand on a telepathic link. May we perpetually inspire each other in this lifetime. It's not too often you find yourself a Mucci.

Doug: How did you guy end up working together?

Phil: After I saw the "Eight of Swords" video, I approached Huntress through my production company at the time, Doomsday Entertainment. My agent didn’t really explain that I had done the Opeth video and that I had done the High on Fire video, so the label just said, “No, we’re probably just going to go with the same guy.” Then, around the holiday season of last year, I got contacted by Huntress’s manager saying, “We love your High on Fire video, we love your Opeth video, we love everything you’ve done. We’re going to record, and we’d really like to get you involved.” I say, “Wow! I tried to get a hold of you guys. I’d love to get involved.” They hadn’t even recorded yet, so I was really excited. I talked to Blake and Jill on the phone, and we got along really, really well. They were just super complimentary. They considered the work that I was doing as being art and being valuable beyond a commercial promotion for a band. Heavy metal has really low budgets, so they usually can’t really afford to go nuts. Even though the subject matter of heavy metal is often fantastical, and full of sci-fi and horror elements, they never really have the money to pull it off, especially now as the budgets get lower and lower. They really seemed to be drawn to the fact that I was trying, at least, to make it unique. I would get the lyrics from Jill and go through them, and she and I would go back and forth with emails, and on phone calls about different things on the album. She taught me all about the Vril Society and pre-Nazi Germany. I thought, “Wow, that’s fascinating. I had no idea about that.” I took everything that was in the lyrics and just started the brain cooking about it, thinking about how I would visualize things and how would I make it interesting. Then I got the track, after I’d already started thinking about the video. The track made me realize we had to really move. It’s got to be fast. It’s got to have a lot of stuff. I realized that I wouldn’t approach it as a straight narrative. I would do some performance and hit people with visuals that built on the theme.

Jill: Within the first seconds of High on Fire's "Fertile Green" video, I became mystified by Phil Mucci. That same day, I spoke to our manager Jackie Kajzer about him and she was on the same wavelength. Jackie made the introduction and our first phone call was electric. We had an instant unique connection, powering each other's creative forces. Huntress is determined to write, record, and release one album per year. Knowing we have to be deadlocked on our timeline made us reach out to Phil before the album was recorded. He heard rough demos of "Zenith" and several other songs on Starbound Beast, which gave him a glimpse into the world we were manifesting.

Doug: The style of this video is similar to some of your previous videos, Phil. How did you come up with this style?

Phil: It started with the Opeth video for "The Devil’s Orchard." The music video business may not have a lot of money in it anymore, but it is extremely competitive. For the first two years I was doing it, I was writing a ton of treatments that were never happening. I started realizing that the band, nine times out of ten, hires their friend or their neighbor or somebody that they’ve worked with before. That’s just basically what it is. At first it was really important to have an agency get me in the door, but once I established a relationship with Rick Ernst at Roadrunner Records, they started to trust me more and more. When Opeth came along, they said, “The band doesn’t need to be in it,” which was awesome for me. "They want to do retro. They want to do old horror movies. They like the 70’s. They like to really out-out there stuff, like Russian sci-fi.” I said, “Great! This is amazing. I’d love to.” Tarkovsky was some of their references. I did a treatment for them based on just the song, because I was given nothing by Opeth. It was just basically, “Here’s some visuals we like. What do you want to do?” So I put together a visual reel and a treatment, and that was the beginning. I gave them a treatment which I didn’t know how to achieve. While I was saying, “These are my ideas,” I was thinking to myself, “I have no fucking clue how I’m going to do this. But if they say, ‘Yes,’ I’ll figure it out.” And they said, “Yes,” so I started figuring it out. I watched all these After Effects tutorials because I had only dabbled in After Effects. I had done digital backgrounds and exterior establishing shots from stills for certain videos. Coming from decades of work in Photoshop, it was pretty easy to tackle that. Getting into where I went with Opeth was much, much more challenging. It was really stressful to make. I had my first panic attack working on that video, because the deadline was looming, and it just was really, really time-consuming. It wasn’t a great budget, but to pull it off, I have to wear a lot of the hats. I can’t do it the way a lot of standard music videos are done, which is everybody has a little role to play and everybody gets paid. Basically I have to do a lot of it to get it in under budget and for me to live while I’m doing it, since they take so long. When Opeth came out, and it got a lot of attention, I had interest from High on Fire, and that was the opportunity. I thought, “Now that I have the confidence to do it, for the High on Fire one, I’m going to take it to the next level. I’m going to actually go further with it and make it even more of a cartoon.” High on Fire was a big one. It ended up taking over three months, because the deadline had been earlier, but Matt went into rehab, so their tour got cancelled, and I was given extra time on the video.

Doug: Is that style influenced by anything?

Phil: Obviously, growing up in the 80’s, I loved that animated movie Heavy Metal. I love Ralph Bakshi movies. I had actually watched a lecture of Ralph Bakshi on YouTube where he basically explained that he stole the rotoscoping live actors from Disney. He said, “That’s what Walt Disney did in Snow White. That’s how he did it. They actually animated every frame on top of it. I didn’t have the time for that or the budget for that, so I figured we’d just color them, stick them in the movie, and I’d be able to finish on time. I’ll be able to have these big, epic scenes and get them done in budget on time. I encourage all of you to do the same thing. It’s not mine. I stole it. I stole it; you steal it.” You think, Waking Life and all these other movies, Scanner Darkly, they’re all using a variation of that rotoscoping technique for animation. What I decided to do is take that and what I knew from Photoshop from all those years, and I would start building sets in Photoshop. I went out to the desert, shot a bunch of rocks at Joshua tree. I would go into the city and shoot buildings. Then I would use all those elements in Photoshop and then build in After-Effects the 3D worlds that I could then stick my characters into. Doing it like that gives me a lot more creative freedom within a very limited budget.

Doug: Jill, you don't hold anything back in your performance in this video and your energy and on camera presence really help set the tone. Was it difficult to bring that level of performance when many of the shots were of you performing alone, in front of a green screen?

Jill: Thank you, I am very at ease when I perform. I grew up in theatre, and have always known my purpose. That confidence has always surrounded me. The shoot for "Zenith" felt effortless, thanks to the care and detail that Phil Mucci brought to this project. And this is considering all my hair, make up and costume changes. I had to wear contacts for the first time ever, these monster cat eyes, which was something Phil and I really wanted to take the Starbound Beast to the next level. We also had beast horns custom made for my head, which altered the way I moved, and that new motion triggered my choreography for the Starbound Beast character. That's always fun for me, seeing how all the various aspects of creating a character bleed into each other and make something far more interesting for the audience. Bory Tan designed the costumes for "Zenith" and she locked into our zone from the first costume fitting. I spent hours dancing and singing along to "Zenith" in varying tempos, blasted by wind fans, nearly naked, with rapid projections crawling all over my body. There was a controlled frenzy occurring and I was hovering in a happy, colorful world of creativity.

Doug: How long does a project like this tend to take?

Phil: We've got it down to about two to two and a half months now. It can be faster if there’s a larger budget. Stone Sour had a larger budget, so I was able to hire, basically, an assistant editor who prepped a lot of the digital files from the green screen shoot so that I could just start building my comps. The first month of the project is normally me stripping elements from green screen and rendering them as animation. The second month is normally building the actual scenes. I have to shoot, do a green screen edit first, and then start stripping the character elements. It’s actually kind of complicated, but somehow it just started coming together for me as a process, learning how to do it. Story boarding on a narrative video is also super-important, because I don’t usually get multiple shoot days. On Stone Sour I shot for two and a half days, because it was that big narrative, with not a lot of characters. The next one I’m doing next weekend I’m shooting for two days as well. That’s rare.

Doug: How frequently do you get people contributing and assisting you in post?

Phil: Once. (laughs)

Doug: That’s intense.

Phil: It’s beyond intense. Actually I try to explain it to people, and it just kind of washes over them. They don’t get it. It’s literally seven days a week, sleeping maybe four hours a night. That’s it. And it goes on and on and on and on.

Doug: For two and a half months.

Phil: Yeah, it doesn’t stop. I have no life. But now that we know what it is, and I’m not with Doomsday anymore, we came up with a way to make it make more sense. We're booking projects in advance, we getting deposits from people. I haven’t competed for a music video in over two years. I haven’t written a treatment out of the blue in over two years, which is so fortunate. I don’t know that I would do it anymore actually. People come to me and say, “We’re thinking about you. Maybe you could write a treatment for us?” I don’t really have time for that, because the work is so labor-intensive that right now I’m rolling one into the other into the other into the other. They’re overlapping. We came up with a method where we’re getting 10% up front to reserve the time, nonrefundable, then we get another 80% to start preproduction, then we get another 10% at the end, which is totally different from a lot of the music video world, but what I’m doing is totally different from the rest of it anyway. We try to sell it as that. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m booked till March of next year. I’ll be in a cave. I’ll probably gain 50 pounds. I’m not doing this for the money. I’m doing this because I love doing it, and I love putting this stuff out there. I came here to make movies, and the whole business became just one disappointment after another. At least in music videos, I’m making stuff all the time, and that’s what I want to be doing. I don’t want to sit in development. There’s also a big barrier to film making that people don’t talk about. It’s kind of a trust fund kids’ game at this point. As a no-name director, which basically I am, you don’t get paid to develop a movie, you’re expected to work your ass off for free for months at a time, and I just can’t afford to do it. 

Doug: Are you able to bring some people in on the production side to help you? Like with prop designs and stuff like that, how much help do you get on that end of things?

Phil: I work with some amazingly talented people. My costume designer Bory Tan is incredible, and she works way more hours than she’s booked for. She also works for way less money for me than she works for anybody else, but we’re great friends, we have a relationship, and we love working together. Same with my hair and make-up artist Christina Guerra, she works on jobs where she gets paid five times what I pay her, but she makes time for my projects, because we all like working together, and they really value the work. They love seeing a video they worked on being - maybe only in Revolver - as one of the best videos of the year. But last year we got two in Revolver, number one and number five. We don’t have a huge audience, but the audience that we have really appreciates what we’re doing, so that’s good. We all enjoy the music too. We all like all kinds of music, but people in rock and roll and heavy metal are some of the nicest people, honestly, way nicer than people I’ve worked with in hip hop or pop. I’m trying to work with more creative artists to help with production. I worked with Chris Speed, who’s a great model maker, and he does all the kind of details that I don’t have time to handle myself, although I end up shooting a lot of effects myself. He did the UFO for this project. He’s doing some oversized stick-pins for our next project. He did some stuff for the Stone Sour video. He’s good. Really, it’s a very small crew. The guy who’s my new executive producer at our production company Diabolik, he’s been the star of a lot of my videos, Ian Mackay. He moved out here with me from New York. We came out here in 2008, when the sky was falling economically. He wears a lot of hats too. He ends up doing production managing, executive producing. There’s a lot of help at the outset, but then once it’s shot, it’s all me in my cave.

Doug: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the UFO and what it was inspired by, what did you ask Chris for when you first told him about the project?

Phil: The UFO idea came from the treatment I wrote where it was just a spontaneous idea like, “Oh, yeah, these UFOs are coming, and there’s this giant space goddess who’s coming to earth summoned by these witches.” In the treatment, I came up with the idea that they’ll open up and they’ll be blasting the music from outer space to earth. I talked to Chris about it, and I said, “I want something Ray Harryhausen, I want something that’s Earth Vs the Flying Saucers.” He and I watched the making of that. We watched this interview with Ray Harryhausen where he had one of the models. I said, “Ours should be slightly more heavy metal. His are kind of nice. Let’s make ours darker, a little bit more angular.” So then it was a matter of Chris just going out scavenger hunting, because we didn’t have a lot of money for it, so he had to find things. I said, “It all has to be in one unit. I don’t want to have to cut.” The only thing we had to cut to the door opening. When you see the door closed on the flying saucers, I just made prints of the closed hatch and just stuck it on the bottom of the UFO for those shots. The hatch was a separate item that opens up. He has tons of photos of all the stuff that he rummaged through, garage sales, and estate sales, trying to find the right speaker, the right casing. It was a lot of work for him actually because we wanted it to be functional. I said, “It has to turn, because we want to animate it, we want stop-motion animation, and it has to be able to be rigged. And I don’t want it to be rigged on wires. I want it to be rigged solid that we can really turn it and mess with it.” It was a process. It was a lot of back and forth. It was a good way for us also to get the Vril symbol into the video, which is in the album packaging and was something that Jill was very adamant about having somewhere in the video.

Doug: I want to talk a little bit about the concept of the video and where that came from. You mentioned getting the lyrics first, and that you started to come with an idea then. Can you talk about the process of coming up with that video form that point and why you went in the direction that you did?

Phil: When the band and I originally spoke, we knew at the outset that we wanted performance to be part of it. The band doesn’t care so much, but Jill is a great front person. She’s got star power. She’s got charisma. She was going to be in the video no matter what. I was originally drawn to the band because of Jill and the "Eight of Swords" video, and I thought, “Wow, this girl’s great. What a great set of pipes. What a looker. What charisma.” That started it. I knew we had to have performance, which was something that I’ve been wanting to try with this technique, but I haven’t had a chance to yet. That was the outset. We knew there was going to be some performance. Then when we started talking about what the album was about, and what the song is about, which is basically getting high with aliens - how high can you get? I said, “Do we want to do the 'Fertile Green' type weed video?” She said, “No, no, no, not necessarily. Just sci-fi, outer space.” I just started taking the phrases literally out of Starbound Beast, the album cover. She’s on the cover as a witch with horns. I said, “What if it’s a beast? What if it’s this being of light?” Which is another line from the lyrics. “What if it is this being of light, and she’s got horns, and she’s a space goddess who’s this massive stalking giant? She can bat planets away.” Jill said, “Yes, yes, yes!” She got really excited about that. I was, “We’ll do the being of light by a process that I’ve been messing around with, which is using op-art patterns that I animated before the shoot and then projecting them onto the figure, which I had tried on Opeth, and High on Fire, but I want to do it different this time. I want to do conflicting patterns projected from two different angles, so that your entire body is covered. There’s no shadows. You’re just entirely encapsulated in light.” She said, “Oh, yeah, that will be awesome!” I say, “It’s going to be really trippy. Nobody’s going to recognize you. You’re going to be totally fucked up looking.” She said, “I don’t care. That sounds amazing.” I said, “Cool, that’s what that’s going to be. The band’s going to walk out of the cosmos and start playing, and this gigantic creature made of light is going to appear, and it’s going to be Jill as this Starbound Beast.” So we had that nailed.

Doug: How did the Vril Society aspect come into play? 

Phil: I was reading the lyrics, there was this thing about the virgin oracle and about seeing prophecies of the future, and I asked, “Where does that come from, Jill?” She said, “It comes from the idea of the Vril Society.” The idea was that these women had psychic abilities, and they could telekinetically communicate with beings from outer space, and they were supposedly getting some psychic messages of the designs of UFO’s so that they could give them to the Luftwaffe to build their own flying UFOs. There was this whole Vril Society in pre-Nazi Germany, and into the Nazi period, that would meet and they were about harnessing psychic power from outer space. I say, “OK, what if we do them sort of like nuns, that we’ll use some Catholic iconography, but it will be very witchy, and we’ll just take it to an extreme. They’ll be sexy.” I had always thought, “This is such a funky, groovy rock and roll groove in this song that I want to have women that can move,” because dancers are one of my favorite things to shoot, period, and they’re also the hardest workers you can have on a music video set. Jill said, “Yes, that would be great.” So I worked on the costuming with Bory, and I thought, “They’ll be blindfolded too. They can’t see, but it’s black lace so it’s a little fetish, and Jill will be the only face that we see.” Jill was just eating it up. We had a fitting for Jill too where we put the big hat on her. She just about flipped out, because it was amazing. It looked like, “What the hell?” Then it started coming together. Then we got these witches who are going to summon the Starbound Beast to earth, and then all these UFOs will show up and they’ll just flock over the planet. They’re going to vaporize the earth. Then I said, “And I have this idea too. It doesn’t really relate, but it will almost be a metaphor of you lying there like a mountain range in the middle of this city, and then as the UFOs come in, you awaken and you just start rising,” and Jill was just like, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” I made an illustration of that and stuck it on the treatment. We actually did the treatment last, which is funny. We do that a lot now. We end up just talking and figuring stuff out. Then I’ll do a treatment to give it to the money guys to say, “Here’s what we’re going to do.” It’s not like an approval process anymore. It’s more like we tell them what we're going to do and then they just say, “OK, here you go.” I felt responsibility to really deliver on this thing, make it as insane as possible. We had hyped it up so much by that point, you can’t show up with a limp noodle, you’ve got to be at, “Oh my God!” That was where the patience of their management came in, because in the end I kept pushing back the delivery date, because it was just more and more stuff in post, and I kept getting ideas as I went along. Once I got the UFO and started shooting that and putting that into scenes, this thing started clicking in my mind. Pretty much everything in the last minute of the video nobody had any idea that most of that stuff was going to be there.

Doug: Is that frequent, adding elements in post that weren't planned?

Phil: It happens almost every single time. There’s two types of videos that I’m doing now. One is kind of like the Huntress video and the High on Fire video, which they have loose narratives, but they’re just kind of visual overload. We’re just going to hit you with all this stuff that keeps pace with the music and let you just sort of soak it in, watch it a bunch of times, figure out what you can from it, and enjoy it. It’s more of a visual odyssey than it is a straightforward video. The thing that I’m so sick of is the gimmick video, “Oh, here’s our gimmick, and we’re going to do it for the whole freakin’ video. Isn’t that awesome?” And that’s 80% of videos now. Or there’s the commercial sell, which is the sappy narrative with the glamorous lighting. We can thank Michel Gondry for all the gimmick videos. The narrative videos are from the 80’s. These are just kind of freak-outs. But in a narrative video, it’s harder. The Pig Destroyer video I did is definitely more of a straight narrative, where I came up with a concept, I bounce it off the band and the label, they agree, I storyboard the hell out of it, and I have one day to shoot it. In 12 hours I had to shoot all these guys on a green screen on a really cheap stage, which only had one wall that was green, and had to blast through it. So that was following storyboards and, in post, getting it done. On that one there wasn’t much room. If I have something like this where there’s a loose set of visual ideas that are thematically related, then, yeah, once you cull all the material, things just start clicking, and you come up with the idea where there’s a jet airliner, and the UFO creeps up on it, and you’re like, “Oh-oh!” Then the giant hand of the Starbound Beast just sky-hooks the airliner. I thought of that three days before I submitted the final video, and I was laughing all day and night when I had put that together. I thought, “This is so wrong and so hilarious."

Doug: What did you think the first time you saw the video, Jill? Was the video pretty similar to what you imagined it would be when shooting?

Jill: We're on tour now with Danzig, the video premiered only days ago, and what most people don't realize is how difficult it is to score an internet connection while you're on the road! The video had just been uploaded by our record label and it was going live on Bloody-Disgusting.com within hours. We had only seen the trailer, like everyone else. The band and I were huddled together in our van, Blake's laptop on his knees, trying to download this huge file on Starbuck's free wifi in a parking lot in Boise, Idaho. It was frustrating because it was so slow, but once it was playing, and I was sharing this moment with my boys, I was in awe. "Zenith" was as I had envisioned it, but it traveled even further, to a place beyond my scope of imagination. I was now in Mucci Land! The most surprising, and perhaps my favorite parts are when the fighter jet first encounters the UFOs, then gets annihilated! That made us all scream and laugh insanely. And also towards the end when my Starbound Beast hand swipes at another plane and it explodes! We got Mooched! Those particular moments we had no clue about, it shows a side of Phil that is twisted and hilarious. Our minds were blown!

Doug Klinger is the co-founder/content director of IMVDb and watches more music videos than anyone on earth. You can find him on twitter at @doug_klinger.