Musician and composer Ben Lovett is no stranger to writing for film -- his award-winning work has been featured in 'The Signal' and 'The Last Goodbye' starring Faye Dunaway, to name a few -- but for 'Eye of the Storm,' it was Lovett who hired a filmmaker to bring his work to life. Director Christopher Alender used state-of-the-art special effects on a shoestring budget for the video, and the result is an eye-popping work that resembles a steampunk take on Frank Miller's 'Sin City' set to Lovett's haunting, acoustic-based song.
"Chris approached me with this idea for the film as an extension of the metaphor," Lovett tells Spinner. "The lyrics in the song deal with a difficult relationship through the portrait of a ship sailing through the heart of a storm."
The video, as described by the director, tells "the story of a lonely captain who has to unshackle himself from a troublesome past in order to move on to the next chapter in his life." To create the lush imagery, Alender exaplains, the process was a painstaking exercise in trial-and-error. "Simulating clouds and water vapor from scratch is extremely labor and computer-intensive and we just didn't have time or money," he says. "To make the different weather conditions, we ended up taking more of a collage approach, poring over thousands of photo sand videos of clouds to get every little piece exactly how we wanted it to look."
"The film is an interesting mirror to the song," Lovett explains. "The recording of 'Eye of the Storm' is all organic instrumentation with a single synthesized element, whereas what you see in the movie is nearly the perfect reversal of that."
"Chris approached me with this idea for the film as an extension of the metaphor," Lovett tells Spinner. "The lyrics in the song deal with a difficult relationship through the portrait of a ship sailing through the heart of a storm."
The video, as described by the director, tells "the story of a lonely captain who has to unshackle himself from a troublesome past in order to move on to the next chapter in his life." To create the lush imagery, Alender exaplains, the process was a painstaking exercise in trial-and-error. "Simulating clouds and water vapor from scratch is extremely labor and computer-intensive and we just didn't have time or money," he says. "To make the different weather conditions, we ended up taking more of a collage approach, poring over thousands of photo sand videos of clouds to get every little piece exactly how we wanted it to look."
"The film is an interesting mirror to the song," Lovett explains. "The recording of 'Eye of the Storm' is all organic instrumentation with a single synthesized element, whereas what you see in the movie is nearly the perfect reversal of that."
EYE OF THE STORM | Lovett from Lovett on Vimeo.
