MACHINE HEAD: 'Locust' Video Preview

MACHINE HEAD's video for the song "Locust" can be previewed in the commercial for the band's new album, "Unto The Locust", which can be seen below. The clip was directed by Mike Sloat, who previously helmed MACHINE HEAD's videos for "Imperium", "Days Turn Blue To Gray", "Aesthetics Of Hate", "Now I Lay Thee Down" and "Halo".

Speaking to the MACHINE HEAD fan site TakeMyScars.com, Sloat stated about the "Locust" clip, "The video is all based on the artwork from the album as well as the vision of the artist, Paul Gerrard. Together we hashed out some concepts for attack scenes as well as the band's performance.

"We shot the band on green screen in Philadelphia on August 1st, 2011. It was on a 'off' date from the [Rockstar Energy Drink] Mayhem Festival. There's well over 600 shots in the video, all of which have varying levels of CG effects, and ended up taking over two months to complete. [It is] easily the BIGGEST music video I've ever done. With so many CG shots, we had to divide the work among several CG FX people and editors. Once the shots came back, I would edit them in and start the color effects and any last minute tweaks I wanted to add.

"Since the song is so long (six minutes and sixteen seconds for the edited version!!),we had a LOT of time to cover, so I began making up scenarios as I edited; the bearded guy at the window, the woman and child, the bloody attack scenes, the church steeple being smashed...these were all made up on the spot as I was editing and found that I needed more scenes! It was actually pretty fun to have to be creative 'on the fly.' The band wasn't able to see very much until the first edit was done (about six weeks after the shoot). From there we tweaked the edit and the look until we found what we wanted. It was a VERY long process, but the end result is pretty great, I think."

Check out photos from the "Locust" video shoot at TakeMyScars.com.