Synopsis

A masked warrior identified by the filmmakers as the last Amazon Queen rides a horse through a stark, dreamlike world where the laws of nature no longer apply. Her hair streams impossibly into the sky as snow, dirt and even mountain peaks drift upward around her. Crows emerge from the surreal landscape, while the rider presses onward through a lonely, ominous realm. The journey ends at a cliff, where queen and horse launch into the void and dissolve into nothingness.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video's imagery was developed from the song's mood rather than from a literal interpretation of the lyrics. The filmmakers described the music as sad, slow and filled with a sense of inevitable doom.

• The central character was conceived as Antiope, described in the treatment as the last Amazon Queen riding toward her doom.

• The costume was handmade over two days in a dining room. Its materials included an old red leather jacket, a traditional Chinese silk dressing gown and a skirt made from weasel pelts.

• Live-action footage was shot near Lumby, British Columbia, on the grass runway of Raven Aviation. Ines Stone played the rider, while a horse named Desi performed as her mount.

• To follow the running horse, the crew filmed from the open door of a moving minivan. Aerial shots were captured from an ultralight aircraft.

• The production used a RED camera, Nikon lenses and 100-frame-per-second 2K footage. Natural light was used for most of the shoot, with several 4 a.m. call times.

• Post-production lasted about a month. The team used After Effects and Photoshop for compositing, Cinema 4D to create the extended hair, PFTrack for attaching it to the rider and SynthEyes for three-dimensional stabilization and tracking.

• The footage was slowed even further in post-production, with the filmmakers using Twixtor to take the material from 100 frames per second toward 200 frames per second.

• The strange upward movement of the snow, dirt and mountain tops came from a decision to alter the video's physics instead of simply adding conventional fantasy scenery. The goal was to create a world that could not exist according to normal natural laws.

• An early version contained approximately twenty scenes. The final edit was reduced to ten, with the crew removing large amounts of completed rotoscoping and hand-painted landscape work.

• Much of the post-production was completed by two people, working on two computers in an apartment in downtown Vancouver.

• Viewers can look for two hidden appearances by members of the production team, Davide and Mihai. One is standing and the other is crouching somewhere in the video.