The Cold Beyond - To War (music video)

Back in early April I had made mention of this 'zine more of less going on a partial hiatus due to my involvement with creating a design/photography business/service called, Khöldstare Design. In the months that have followed I've done promo photos for bands, shot live groups onstage many, many times as well as constantly creating my own twisted dark creations for hopeful album cover use someday. One of my more recent and quite tasking projects was creating a music video for the black metal band, The Cold Beyond.

To be completely forthright though, the project originally started as just me finding myself with nothing to do, boredom, when I began piecing together live footage I'd captured of the band with various combat scenes from World War II. Initially I just worked with about two minutes of the song (which is over eight minutes), but after showing one of the members my work he was more or less ecstatic and urged me to go onwards. And so I did.

The song itself is about war, I don't think the lyrics glorify war or death in any manner of speaking, but more specifically its a warning about war and how will eventually all just destroy each other in the midst of battle. Keeping in mind its a black metal song it has both its early slower building aspects as well as fierce violent sections and even moments of slow dirgy melancholy parts. Generally speaking, I think the song fucking kills, and I still think it kicks ass after listening to it about thousand times during the creation of the video.

A lot of people have asked and the answer to how I created it was with Nero Video. I had purchased this program already several months prior because I'd been shooting live footage of bands onstage for about three years now and I wanted to start my own personal DVDr series of that footage. I call it 'Metal Shenanigans' and I'm up to Volume 12 already (haha!). I'm sure several more could have been made, but I don't always shoot every band I see and sometimes my level of drunkeness may turn out varying results too (haha!).

Anyway, I had not really used the editing aspects of Nero Video much before this video and as such the whole thing became a learning process of trial and error and largely I think what I came up with fits fairly well to the song and its atmospheres. Fortunately, the band and their fans were quite pleased with the results and there's already been further interest in me creating music videos for some bands. Some people talked shit as well, but what can you do? Some people are jealous of others creativity and the art they create in their lives.

All together the video runs for over ten minutes since a proper credits roll was added as well as a glimpse into the bands future endeavors at the very end.

I should lastly point out that The Cold Beyond is NOT an NSBM band nor is their any Nazi imagery or even dead bodies in the entire video. The whole video is based around combat footage and the aftermaths of raging war.

So, without further hindrance I give you The Cold Beyond's 'To War!'