I made a cult recruitment tape from 1998 because I wanted to and that seemed like a good enough reason

It’s 1998. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon. You’re stuck at that one ‘cool’ uncle’s house with nothing to do. You might not have an uncle like this, or even an uncle at all, but you know the sort of guy I’m talking about. He probably has a flannel shirt (if we’re being era specific), and he might even have that little bit of square hair under his lip that we used to call a “soul patch.” Cool uncle alert! He’s got a tape collection and it’s great. He’s got From Dusk ‘Til Dawn in there, that 1970s animated version of Lord of the Rings, and a bunch of episodes of Tales From The Crypt he’s taped from late night TV with handwritten labels. As you cast your eye over his VHS vault, something with the acronym V.V.A.R.P catches your eye. You bung it into the VCR and realise you’ve discovered some new age cult recruitment tape for something called “The Vanguard of Vibrational Ascension and Radiant Potential” - or have you? 

Nah. It’s just some music video I made for my band in 2025, but this is the vibe I was going for. Spooky tape on your weird uncle’s shelf. I wrote about this over here, but in planning for the release of my band VVARP’s new record Power Held In Stone I wanted to do a music video. However, I did not want to pay music video prices. Our budget was more or less $0, so I did it myself with the help of some friends. This is how:

I started working on this project by gathering inspiration. The song opens with some lofi keyboard textures before heading into some heavy metal territory. We needed something that stylistically matched the grainy, hazy nature of the intro to the song but also felt consistent with the mystical and mysterious lyrics you might find in a song called A Path Through The Veil.  Some other stylistic influences that I felt fit the bill here were weird 80s/90s made-for-tv documentaries and PSAs on the paranormal that I found on Archive.org, and less so, Tony Robbins infomercials from the same era. The internet is a great place, and accessing this niche content is surprisingly very simple. I wrote this little preamble at the start of the video to set the scene for something that resembled these influences, and expanded the lore behind my band VVARP with an acronym - the Vanguard of Vibrational Ascension and Radiant Potential. It made me think of ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ if you know your cults. Very interesting visual presence among other things. I went to work hacking up a few public domain videos that fit the bill, and everything else that I couldn’t find I used either Midjourney or Veo 3 to generate. I could write a whole post on GenAI (and I might) but for now just know I have complicated feelings on its usage, but I certainly appreciate how it can democratise aspects of filmmaking and lead to some cool results. Some of the new imagery was meant to also reference lyrics or themes from the album itself, but also fit the period-specific vibe of the video. In order to complete my vision, this would require a more analog approach over artificial… 

As a video nerd, I love a good aspect ratio. I used to want everything to be 16:9, and in the early days of my video making, I was angry when I saw anything less than 1080p at 16:9 aspect ratio. I now realise the error in my ways, and find myself drawn to the classic 4:3 aspect ratio of my youth. It takes me back to Friday nights in New Zealand and the weird stuff that would come on free-to-air TV at that time. If you stayed up to 1am and switched to C4, you’d get The Steel Mill. This was a show that just played heavy metal music videos - both local stuff like 8 Foot Sativa (what a name!) and international stuff as well.  This visual experience really coloured my immersion into heavy music, and music making generally, so it only made sense I would want to bring things back a bit to a time where screens were more square, and resolution was low. 

As far as actual footage goes, we shot the band stuff at a hall in South Melbourne and shot everything on a Sony FX3 and these vintage Nikon lenses I bought in Japan last year. We hired a smoke machine and borrowed some big RGB lights. Shot 3 lighting setups (natural daylight, Red light, and blue light) with a variety of angles per lighting setup and we were done. We deliberately obscured faces to keep up the mystique surrounding the strange tape. The super high colour contrast lighting setups were definitely inspired by Mandy (a film we all collectively love), and there’s even a lyric in there that might have something to do with the film too… 

The next analog callback that would complete the aesthetic was the VHS element itself. The best way to make your video recorded in 2025 look like it’s shot on tape is to do just that… and the second best is to shoot it on digital and transfer to tape… and then transfer that back to digital. So that’s what we did. No plugins or emulations, just actual tape transfers. Thankfully Scott  (who is also the drummer in VVARP) knows heaps about this, and does their own video art stuff (with a heavy emphasis on analog video experimentation) under the name ‘Celestial Tapes.’ Scott and I basically did this: 

We had to do this a few times to get the image looking punchy enough once it was scanned back to digital, and Scott also did a bunch of really effected passes where we recorded whole takes of the video from start to finish with lots of glitch effects on the VHS (achieved with a mix of actually manipulating another VHS player, or using some analog video effects that Scott had) that I used to punctuate certain parts of the video. What you ended up with in the edit suite was something that looked like a multicamera clip of the whole finished video - a “clean” pass of just the video recorded to VHS and scanned back, and numerous “dirty” passes that were heavily effected. I used a lot of the various dirty effects to build transitions from band footage, to the strange artifacts that felt more closely related to the video’s intro. I was hoping the effect of this would feel like the band footage was almost like someone had either accidentally recorded over this tape, or that the band footage was breaking through from another place. All interpretations are welcome! 

Because the VHS recording did so much heavy lifting, I didn’t do a lot of colour grading or have to add any sort of VHS emulation. What you see really was just recorded to tape and scanned back and assembled. I was happy with the results, and can definitely see myself incorporating this analog process into my work in the future. I think with the rise of AI video tools (again, complicated feelings on this) having some sort of analog anchor in the work can be a great way of doing something uniquely yours.

I’m aiming to keep making music videos in future, as I think they’re a fantastic way of trying new techniques and getting to flex a bit of creativity into videos. Writing this, I’m reminded I initially was drawn to making videos because I liked watching them, and that making them seemed fun to do. So that’s my plan for future music videos - to enjoy making them and to have fun. Hopefully I’ll end up with a few more spooky tapes on some cool uncle’s shelf. 

The gang after the big DIY music vid!