A Walkthrough of defasten’s Music Video for Violent Magic Orchestra’s “Planet Helvetech”

Note: this is a follow-up to our interview with defasten. If you haven’t read that yet, be sure to check it out here!

Patrick Doan is a Canadian digital artist based in Berlin who publishes under the username “defasten.” With a background in design, film, and architecture, he now specialises in creating dynamic real-time 3D graphics.

Working mainly in the music, digital arts, and events industry, his future-facing visual designs exist as audio-reactive, generative, deconstructed geometric objects establishing a simulated digital reality.

Patrick’s musical collaborations include works with Violent Magic Orchestra, Beardyman, SØS Gunver Ryberg, Fausto Mercier, Yaporigami, Max Dahlhaus, Blush Response, Vladislav Delay + Max Loderbauer, Azu Tiwaline, Peter Kirn, and more.

He has worked on world-class projects with Silent Partners Studio, Virtual Innovation Partners, Immersive London, XiteLabs, Moment Factory, EVOKE Studios, and more.

Patrick has exhibited works in over 25 countries, including online. Events include: ISE 2024 (Barcelona), Beyond Basel 2023 (Art Basel Miami), Neo Shibuya 2023 (Tokyo), The New Museum (NYC), Ars Electronica, CTM 2021 Cyberia (with Xquisite Force SFX), Transmediale, with Suguru Goto at WWW in Tokyo (2016), MIRA 2021 with Azu Tiwaline, FLARE 2022 Shanghai, BRDG Channel 22 with Yaporigami (Tokyo 2020), SIGGRAPH 2006.

As a member of the sonic research collective AUDINT from 2015 to 2021, they showed work at Unsound 2019, MIRA 2019, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Arebyte London, Sonar Istanbul 2017, Loop Berlin 2016, MUTEK Montréal 2015.

Patrick’s work is featured in the book The Age of Data by Christoph Grünberger, published on Niggli Verlag (2021), featuring works by 40 artists like Refik Anadol, Daito Manabe, Joshua Davis (Praystation), Joëlle Snaith, Christopher Bauder, Quayola, Nonotak, and more with a foreword by Ian Anderson (The Designer’s Republic).

In this walkthrough, defasten takes us through the process of creating the music video for Violent Magic Orchestra’s “Planet Helvetech.”

“Osaka-based six-piece fuses black metal aesthetics with the endorphin rush of peak time hard trance and gabber.” — The Wire Magazine

Violent Magic Orchestra, aka VMO, are a multi-piece band from Osaka, Japan. Their sound harmoniously integrates techno, black metal, industrial, and noise. The result is something like “black metal meets Kraftwerk” or “blackened Aphex Twin.”

In 2023, they completed a successful EU Tour, including playing CTM at Berghain earlier that year. VMO will perform at Sonar 2024 in Barcelona alongside confirmed artists such as Air, Charlotte de Witte, Emptyset, Team Rolfes, Asian Dope Boys, ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U, and more.

‘‘Planet Helvetech’’ premiered in The Wire Magazine and is the opening track of their new album, DEATH RAVE, which was released in March 2024 on the label NEVER SLEEP by Gabber Eleganza.

Background

VMO contacted me in the summer of 2023 after they saw my work displayed on the large screens in Shibuya, central Tokyo, thanks to the Neo Shibuya TV platform.

They sent me a short description of their new album’s concept and generally gave me carte blanche to create anything after seeing what I could do. To me, this is the best-case scenario, as it means your collaborator has total trust in you and respects your creative vision.

I did my research and looked at the band’s music videos and live shows (with visuals by Kezzardrix), and it got me thinking about other ways their unique mash-up of black metal meets gabber/techno/rave could translate visually in my own way.

Concept

After my research, I decided to make something otherworldly yet recognizable within the existing visual codes of the band’s aesthetic — something that would extend their mythology. I looked at references for god-like beings and ran into angels. The biblical description of angels is quite scary, extraterrestrial, and not from this world. I thought of this as a focal point of the piece, as it was a historically familiar icon already embedded in human religion and spirituality.

I settled on the loose idea of a messenger travelling through space and time, descending to Earth. The track “Planet Helvetech” is also the album’s opener, so the video would work as a prelude for what’s to come. It has a sense of mystery and deep darkness but also hype and even pristine positivity. I wanted to place the viewer in this space out of time, looking at some kind of xeno-landscape of this non-human world they inhabit.

Running with this idea, I created scenes with the goal of expanding the concept of what this alien xeno-technology could look like. I made the spacegate portal, the cables’ sphere core, and serpentine warp tunnels, all inspired by the biomechanical designs of H. R. Giger. Essentially, I’ve envisioned fundamental structures and landmarks that signify the xeno-architecture of the species.

Storyboarding

After listening to the track a few times, I started blocking out the sections directly in Premiere Pro. I used to storyboard things in a document first, but these days, I go directly into the video editor and lay out the visual sections while adding notes.

After working extensively with timed-based media, taking notes directly on a timeline feels more intuitive to me than doing this on a static document. This method helps me skip the brainstorming mode and immediately figure out the music’s pacing and visual plan.

3D, Models, and Materials

To design this world, I gathered existing 3D models from various sites. I usually search on Sketchfab, CGTrader, ArtStation, and the Unreal Marketplace. They have game-ready assets you can download, so they’re suited to run in real time or need minimal optimisation to run in Notch.

Iridescent Metallic Shine

I created a metallic, glossy, dark material, like a pitch-black obsidian crystal, that, when angled correctly, reflected prismatic colours.

After several experiments, I decided to do this by using an HDRI environment map with a rainbow-iridescent gradient texture applied to it while setting other Material values, like Brightness, to near 0.

Portal

This is the establishing shot. It sets the tone and location. As I worked on it, I liked the idea of being slowly introduced to this alien portal. We don’t exactly know what it is, but it’s later implied that it’s used to travel between worlds.

The ring structure consists of a selection of the ILEP models I strung together with multiple Cloners set to Radial, which I then adjusted the parameters until it looked like it was a well-used, glowing biomechanical space object with its own logic, floating in an idle state.

Here, it was essential to get the mood right, so I spent quite some time adjusting a few nodes, such as Volumetric Lighting, the intermittent flickering of lights and distant illumination, the density of the space dust, and the slow cinematic camera moves, all made to emphasize the atmosphere around this hulking xeno-superstructure hanging in space.

Ring

In the middle of this structure is the glowing energy portal through which spaceships jump. I made this with a combination of Fractal Noise and Post-FX nodes. I then added a Radial Blur, which provided the smokey, rippling refractive light effect at the edges of the energy ring.

Sphere Core Cables

After the space portal, the idea here was to show some kind of energy source — like a turbine — pulling in power from invisible/dark matter or some other dimension. There’s something horror-like about layers of intricate wires wrapped into the shape of a sphere or other geometric shapes; I’m thinking of a similar device used in films like Event Horizon and Hellraiser or in the game Silent Hill. Sometimes, we don’t want to know what these devices are really doing. They’re simply gathering dark energy.

Like the portal scene, it was important to feel the mood and atmosphere here, so I imported most of the Volumetric Lighting settings from the portal scene; I then recalibrated things like the placement of Lights and other parameters.

I set the cables on a Cloner Spline and made them out of a selection of the models from the ILEP cable series. The Red Core behind the cables is a Sphere with adjusted Fractal Noise and a Particle Emitter emanating particles gravitating towards a Mesh Attractor at the centre.

Serpentine Spline Cloner

This scene gives an abstract look at some of the living structures that exist in this universe. I like the fluidity of the biomechanical shapes flowing together inside what could be a womb or an organic cavity. Thanks to the organic-tech quality of the ILEP models, I achieved a sleek cyber-aesthetic in the video’s overall sensibilities.

Wormhole Network

For this shot, I thought it was important to show how the alien tech ‘‘worked,” how grand in scale it is, and how we’re travelling far out somewhere into unknown space. So I made a classic Torus tunnel, set the camera inside the Torus, and used a very wide-angle lens to pull in as much of the scene as possible and allow the viewer to feel the dynamic speed of the ride. Here, we see how the single warp tunnel is part of a vast network, as seen in the distance.

The warp tunnel object we follow comprises the ILEP cables library with other serpentine-like structures in the background set to a Spline Deformer and populated with a Random Cloner. As always, for continuity, I finished off this scene with adjusted Volumetric Lighting and Fog Scattering to maintain a sense of traversing across and inside a living xeno-architectural organic landscape.

Angel

I created my own spin on this supernatural being and merged most of the objects from the other scenes into this set piece, adding the warp tunnel and particle trails around it. I decided to have a single camera locked onto the angel to focus on the strangeness of this creature and its immensity and to take in all the visual detail.

I made the angel wings by combining three different designs rigged with Nulls. After calibrating some Math Modifiers and Turbulence Deformers, I achieved the impression of all the wings flying together.

I then layered multiple ring designs hovering around the eye: the chains, the Giger-like serpentine object (with one instance bursting open with a Chunk Effector), and the multi-eye squared rings. The eyeball is a 3D object with a Clone To Mesh wrapping most of the eye and a Plain Effector shaped to act like an open/closing eye. I like how you can see the eyeball veins ‘‘moving.” This was done simply with the Material / UV Offset Y / Continuous Modifier.

Warp Tunnel

The wormhole through which the angel travels comprises a Fractal Noise with Radial Blur set to a Cylinder. The sense of speed was achieved by setting a Continuous Modifier to the Position Z of the Fractal Noise and adding some more Continuous Modifiers to the Rotation Heading and Banking to the Sphere itself. The end result is a dizzying tunnel effect.

Overall, the idea here is to give a sense of the faster-than-light speed at which the Angel is travelling, along with the increasing crescendo of this musical passage. It’s meant to be a moment of euphoric surrender.

My choice to showcase this scene in bright neon colours references a few things, like the laser lighting system of a good nightclub or the classic ending sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with intense light patterns flashing beyond human perception.

Fallen Angel/Sphere Core

In many ways, the Fallen Angel symbolizes a bridge between the human world and the xeno-world, a being that was expelled from “Heaven.” But these scenes are open to interpretation, of course. It could be interpreted as an out-of-body experience. But I also meant to provide a relatable third-person, human-scale point of view of the whole environment and how sublime it is.

These scenes are composed of the Fallen Angel in one layer and the Warp Tunnel and Sphere Core in a separate layer behind. The trick here is to adjust the scale, speed, and material movement to fit the scene’s speeding motion.

Closing Thoughts

The video for VMO’s “Planet Helvetech” should set the stage for the rest of the album. I like working with a creative collaborator with a strong vision of their project, whether sonically or visually, so that I can be confident in my own sensibilities. A situation like that gives space for a well-informed creative graphics expression.

With VMO, I feel like their maximalist style has built such a solid foundation that any accompanying visual expression should be a total shock to the senses, just like their live shows.

A special thanks to defasten for taking the time to sit down and talk to us about his process. You can follow him on Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and his website.