If you’re partial to magic mirrors, fractured identities, and warped realities, you’ve come to the right place. Chicago’s dark dream-pop band Kill Scenes creates sonic worlds that tickle 80’s and 90’s musical and filmic nostalgia.
When we teamed up to create a music video for their song “Acid Black Window,” we aimed to complement that nostalgia cinematically. They wanted to create 3 unique layers of reality—a shadowy home, a dreamy beach, and a realm of almost pure abstraction. Production design and cinematography took inspiration from films like “Blue Velvet,” and “Jacob’s Ladder.” For the video’s climax, a cloud tank—made up of salinated water and colored dyes—was used to produce 1980’s-style cloudscapes similar to those seen in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “Ghostbusters.”
Stir in hovering mirrors, mysterious masks in the water, an ethereal slow motion performance from the band, and the results are a one way goth-acid trip straight to Valhalla.
- Cast: Samantha Siouxhi
- Story: Sean Whittaker
- Director + DP + Editor: Ben Nissen
- Producer: Katie Clementz
- VFX: Joe Siwak + Ben Nissen + Katie Clementz
- Production Designer: Margo Siwak
- Kill Scenes: Sean Whittaker, Meghan Lamb, Jon Podulka, Andrew Hertzberg
