The Hip Abduction’s videos usually give fans a glimpse into the band’s travels all over the world, but the St. Petersburg-based tropical-pop outfit flipped the script on this latest clip for “Come Alive.”
[Side note: the boys and their fans just won a Best of the Bay for a Kickstarter campaign they ran last year — read more here.]
“‘‘Come Alive’ is about learning to cope with the unknown. In my case, and more specifically, anxiety” frontman David New told JamBase. “A reoccurring dream that involved wolves, eventually led me to stop worrying so much. I know we all deal with these issues in our own ways and sometimes folks go their whole lives without mentioning anything to anyone. It’s crazy that we spend so much of our lives worrying about the past (guilt), or the future (anxiety), that it prevents the present from being fully lived.”
DO THIS: ET CULTURA MUSIC FESTIVAL AT STATION HOUSE — NOV. 18-20
For the video, The Hip Abduction asked fans to send them clips of themselves feeling alive while the cut from their latest album, Gold Under the Glow, plays in the background. The results feature a lot of skateboarding, cliff diving, hula hooping, motorcycle riding and hang gliding. It makes you want to get outside, but it must have been a massive task to edit all the fan shot footage into one clip.
“I've experienced many THA concerts so I know how passionate and exciting their fans are,” director Dylan Melcher told CL. Melcher, 31, had to organize all the footage and find a story line. He went with the airplane imagery to open the video.
“I knew I had to get the viewer from point A to point B. The plane taking off said to me.. ‘Let's go on a journey together.’ So I thought that was the perfect way to start the video and signal a forward moving action,” he said, adding that he let go of any preconceived rules of filmmaking to get it done.
“Most of these fans aren't professional filmmakers so they don't follow the rules of composition, exposure, depth, movement etc,” he said. “But that's the beautiful part, that's what makes this video so authentic and engaging. I had to totally disregard any rules I knew and submerse myself into the world and minds of the contributors in order to tell their story. I hope I made the fans proud. It's an amazing group of people.”
Watch the clip below and see the band live on November 18 when they play a hometown show for the Et Cultura festival in St. Petersburg. More information on the show is available at CL’s events calendar.
