By Keith Walsh
WeirdWolves, the Austin-based post punk duo of Raf Colantonio and Ava Gore, revel in dark sound textures, and their visual style carries that forward very strongly. I had a chance to ask a some questions of Erik Gustafson, whose company Erik Gustafson Cinematography produced WeirdWolves’ new video for “Perfect Storm,” as well as the duo’s previous video for “Overdrive.” It turns out that Gustafson has a background in creating videos for other dark electronic and Goth bands, and related genres and is an electronic musician himself.
Synthbeat: How did the song ‘Perfect Storm’ and the music of Raf and Ava inspire you to create the atmosphere of this latest video? What films inspired the scenes?
Erik:“Raf and I have been wanting to work together for a while now, and we finally got the chance with these two latest videos. The story was entirely written/scripted by him, as he is most definitely a career storyteller with his game design. What I feel I brought from paper to screen is an innate goth/dark aesthetic and style. As far as films that inspired? We both kind of pulled little ideas from various themes from the original ‘Evil Dead’ movie, ‘Blair Witch,’ and for the “witch” character in the video, I really liked the idea of her being somewhat of a ‘Cryptid’ and initially I wanted to throw it back to Loch Ness-type of obscured footage before showing her fully.”
Synthbeat: What is your experience with making horror footage, and what other types of videos have you made?
Erik: “Honestly I’m not so much a horror guy, but I do draw influence from aesthetics in movies such as the Underworld series, early 2000’s supernatural movies such as ‘The Ring,’ 80’s and 90’s ‘golden age of MTV’ music videos, and lots of occult imagery and general witchy things hehe. Overall I really enjoy dark moody lighting, and very dark color correction as well.”
“As far as other videos, I’ve done quite a few with this company, we are only a few years old, but gotten a lot done with regional Texas artists in the range of Dark rock, Industrial, Goth, Metal and dark electronic. My wife Gaby is also a part of the company, and I’ve also done videos for her band, Eva X, so that has also been a great experience. She’s Canadian so I shot my first international video in Calgary in the snow covered mountains. So that was some free production value right there!”
Synthbeat: What cameras and lighting did you use?
Erik: “I started out my cinematography journey as a musician wanting to do music videos for my own band, Adoration Destroyed (Cleopatra Records) and bought an entry level Black Magic pocket cinema camera. So I now have 2 4K Black magic cinema cams, and some of that video also had a bit of Panasonic GH4. As far as lighting, I use Aputure and Nanlight almost exclusively, as well as some various tube/wand type of portable battery powered LED mini lights”
Synthbeat: What’s the forest location used in the video?
Erik: “The forest location was sort of a park location behind a south Austin apartment complex. Quite a find indeed!”
Synthbeat: Who did costumes and makeup?
Erik: “Ava was the costume department for the band, and our resident Witch Zoe Sol brought her whole ensemble of real-life witchy things along, to great effect!”
Synthbeat: How did you meet Raf and Ava?
Erik: “I met Raf maybe in 2012? We met by chance through people we were dating at the time and kinda hit it off, but then lost touch until 2019 when his band was just starting to gain traction. We ended up rekindling and bonded over talking stage lighting, and my company was also just getting some traction as well. After some fun hangs and needing out over gear we knew it would be great to work together somehow.”
For more info check the following links:
Erik Gustafson Cinematography On Facebook
EGCine.com
WeirdWolves.com
Eva X On Bandcamp
Adoration Destroyed On Bandcamp
Zoe Sol On Facebook
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