Janus ‘Eyesore’ — Video

Janus frontman David Scotney estimates that video director Noah Shulman put in at least 300 to 400 post-production hours for the band's 'Eyesore' video. The melodic hard song is the first single from 'Red Right Return,' an album released independently last November, but will be re-released September 22 on Reality/ILG.

"We said we'd love to take this Russian 1920s constructionist vibe that surrounds the record artwork and promotional materials, and somehow bring this to a performance video that told some sort of story that lived in this theme," Scotney explains.

The Illinois band – Scotney, bassist Alan Quitman, percussionist Johnny Salazar and guitarist/programmer Mike Tyranski – played live against a green screen, and the rest of what we see – the explosions and apocalyptic visuals – are all digitally produced by Shulman.

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Scotney, a painter, created about 12 to 15 storyboards with assorted images and textures and artwork, which Shulman brought to life in the final video product.

The army is a mix of real people and computer generated, says Scotney. "It's actually a series of people that were videotaped from different angles and then they were composited together in post production. For those scenes, because of the hundreds of layers of effects and video, it took three to five hours for every two to three seconds of video that was rendered."

Even English phrases that flash in the video are written in a Russian Bolshevik style font. "I think the constructionist stuff is a cool period of poster art," says Scotney. "Russian war propaganda poster art had a very graphic bold style to it. "

The lyrics to the song have little to do with the video concept, however. "The lyrics couldn't be more straightforward. Within the first four lines, you should be able to grasp what I'm trying to say," he says.

Those lines are: Hearing your words out of my mouth again, Leaves me stuck with the key to, All these reasons you got in my head again, Buried here inside of me.

"It's just about a moment in time where this person catches himself trying to be someone else or hearing someone else's words out of their own mouth and realizing that if you're not true to yourself, and you let other people affect you to the point where you're actually repeating their phases and their words, it can deform you and turn into this physical eyesore," Scotney says.

"It's about that moment of being true to yourself, and I presented that concept to Noah and he decide to take a more conceptual approach, where he had us play and put this army out there and create that moment of division. But for me, it was a more personal moment."

The iTunes re-release of 'Red Right Return' will be packaged with the video. A radio edit of the song will also be available.