Behind the Scenes: Filming Adamantis’s Video at Bancroft's Castle
**Update!**
Since posting this blog, the music video has been released! Check it out!
Adamantis - Steelclad (Official Music Video)
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My good friend and collaborator, Yelena, invited me to work as a Production Assistant on a music video shoot for Adamantis, a metal band based in Boston, MA. Yelena is very involved in the metal music scene and has done a lot of film shoots for bands, so I was excited to be a part of this one! We met up at Bancroft’s Castle in Groton and had a blast figuring out logistics, mapping shots, and managing props. We captured some incredible footage!
If you've never been to Bancroft Castle, let's just set the scene a bit.
 This huge gnarly tree grew right inside the castle. We filmed part of our video here! |
In this old tower you can look right up into the sky. You can also see the fireplaces of the different floors. |
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An old archway. You can almost imaging the people and things that traveled through this door. |
Bancroft Castle is a beautiful ruin of an old sanitarium from the early 1900's. It was SO perfect for the look we were going for. It was a beautiful, overcast, and chilly New England autumn day and the view of the trees out in the distance, still in the midst of changing color, was the type of view that people would be traveling here for in mere weeks.
For more info on the Castle itself, here's a link to Atlas Obscura which does a great job of summarizing the strange history. It certainly wont be anything like what you think!
It was so great meeting and working with the band’s vocalist, Jeff, to help make the video as awesome as possible. We had lots of logistics to figure out. Not only was I coming off of having the flu, but the sky was threatening rain almost constantly, and we had plastic Halloween skeletons that we needed to prop up and cover with robes on a very hilly and uneven ground. Challenging!
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Me, recovering from having the flu. This was the first day I felt well enough to go outside again. |
Yelena finding the exact angle in the tower to capture Jeff for the video. |
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Hey! |
A couple of tourists stopped to take a look at our props. Two weeks before Halloween, it certainly fit the setting! |
Yelena is an incredible videographer, and I am so jealous of the amazing equipment she has. The footage looked so gorgeous in the camera so I can only image how the results will be! Here she is putting body and equipment all on the line for a shot.
 Getting some b-roll.
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Luckily we kept an eye on the weather and Yelena was able to cover her very expensive camera equipment to protect it from the rain. |
The music video will be released sometime later this year. I will be sure to link to it in a future post! In the meantime, check out the band!
Another fun and unexpected event of the day, we ran into a fellow local artist named Raven Belasco, an author who writes the Blood & Ancient Scrolls dark fantasy series. She was at the castle taking Halloween photos to promote the new cover of her book, Blood Demands. It was great to meet her and chat with another local creator! Here’s a picture I took of Raven in her gorgeous Halloween dress, and Jeff in his music video wardrobe, standing in the ruins of Bancroft’s Castle. Life truly feels like a fantasy sometimes!
