Where my "videography" career began, thanks to Reverend and Hellhound hiring a nerdy kid..
Sometime in 2002 I dated this goth girl in high school and her mom's boyfriend Ken "Hellhound" Brown was the guitarist of Arch Demon Choir. Ken's an intense guy who builds his own guitars, he's a tremendous guitarist, tasteful. We'd bullshit about movies and metal a lot, I fixed his computer a few times. When the headstock of my brother's Les Paul snapped off, Ken recommended Ace Frehley's guy to fix it. I still have that axe to this day, the repair held up nicely. Eventually I broke up with that goth girl and two years later graduated high school.
One day Ken hit me up to layout some artwork for the band. The artist had drawn it in a tall rectangle and like all CDs and albums, it needed to be square. Rather than omit the top/bottom, I copied and pasted the fuck out of it to build out the sides. This was before the days of "content aware fill" and all of those new fangled AI tools. I used Photoshop to layout their artwork, the insert, etc. (In retrospect I used every poor design choice.) We did a photoshoot and I added the posh Eyecandy fire effect of the time. I became pretty tight with those guys during the photo shoot, we had a good time. I was a nerdy 18 year old with cameras, and I took my fair share of verbal abuse. I kind of loved it. Ricky Rockitt from Kevin's old band Witches of Moodus took particular offense to my presence one day, he kept blowing kisses at me and calling me "Pretty Boy Floyd" in his gruff gravelly voice. My friend Bryan and I still laugh about it to this day. My friends and I would go hang out with the Arch Demon Choir guys a lot.
My friend Jong and I shot the record release show for a DVD we released called Vicious Visuals. This was the old days of Hi8 and DV. We're spoiled in modern times, shooting in HD, popping out an SD card, and dropping your footage into your editing suite of choice. Back in those days we shot the whole show on two cameras (a Hi8 and a DV), captured the footage, sync'd the audio, and sliced between them.
And then came the music video. I learned so much shooting this music video. I really wanted to do a video for Tarot, it was a fun fast song, great riff, punchy. We ended up shooting a music video for Voodoo Doll. Don't get me wrong, I love the song, and it tells a great story, and god damn did we shoot a fun video, but it was a lot of time to fill. Lots of days with just me and Ken shooting guitar solos... in a cemetery, a top a tank, I stole the Sin City thing where everything is black and white except for his green custom build guitar. We shot a ton of footage, three different cemeteries, a castle, the rehearsal space, we turned Kevin's basement into a summoning ground for demons, we staged a murder scene and shot polaroid pictures.
One genius thing I always noticed about Kevin is that he nips any potential problems with pedestrians and on-lookers right in the bud. If there are people around, he's friendly to them "Hey how ya doing? We're shooting a music video." and people wanted to know about the band. He was a great salesman and knew how to command an audience.
I was just a nerdy kid and these dudes took me under their wing. The night we shot the pentagram candle woman in the basement of Kevin's house, my friend and I showed up and he was hosting a fucking rager of a party, for a scene that's supposed to be one person with candles and pentagram on the basement floor of a dark room. We needed to clear out the basement, which I was dreading because everyone was pretty hammered. Kevin immediately ordered everyone who's not in the scene to leave, and everyone picked up and went upstairs. He was the metalhead whisperer.
Unfortunately Kevin Reverend Imor passed away Sept 25, 2010. He would always tell us how awesome the Moodus reservoir was, it was the name sake of his band Witches of Moodus, so it's kind of weird to me that that's where he passed away. After I shot their video, we were hanging at his house one day and I asked him to hear Witches of Moodus. He gave me two CDs saying "These are the last two I have" and I played the fuck out of them. I think of Reverend often. I learned so much from him by osmosis and I'm forever grateful to have had that experience.
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