Death Hawks: Behind Thyme - Sami Sänpäkkilä

This is the second video for the band Death Hawks I’ve made. Check out the first one Black Acid here. Death Hawks are releasing their third album “Sun Future Moon” shortly. First single is called Behind Thyme which we filmed during the moon eclipse on September 26th 2015. One of my favourite painters is Hugo Simberg and although you most likely won’t see his influence in the video it’s sort of an homage to the painting “In the Garden of Death“. We had no script as you can imagine. The idea was just to have the band take a relaxed stroll with friends in the garden at night.

We used a whole bunch of UV lights to light up the video and painted everything and everyone with UV paints, eyeliner and lipstick. We used four 400 watt UV lamps, big things that make a lot of noise, and two really small LED lamps which were lightweight and totally silent. Loads better those small ones. A lot of weird things shine in UV light like tonic water. There’s some pretty crazy videos online about this which we found out doing research.

Video was shot at a ratio of 1:2.39 with the Sony FS700 and Odyssey 7Q+. It would’ve been nearly impossible to expose this correctly without the Odysseys LUT functionality which enables you to see the image with preliminary color correction on set. I used a bit of my newish mini dolly built by Tomas Regan but mostly the video was shot handheld 50fps and some shots at 100fps.

Directed by Sami Sänpäkkilä
Edited by Eeva Tuomi and Sami Sänpäkkilä
Gaffer: Anna-Mari Nousiainen
Assistants: Mapi Nousiainen, Eeva Tuomi
Make-up: Ville Pirinen, Ilkka Vekka and the actors
Featuring Ville Pirinen, Ilkka Vekka, Maria Stereo and Death Hawks