Pièce No. Trois Video Is Released
As part of Vision Éternel’s 10-year anniversary celebration, it is with extreme pleasure that we are releasing a brand new music video for “Pièce No. Trois“. It’s been seven and a half years since Vision Éternel last released a music video, for “Season In Absence” in March of 2010. Today, August 28th, is an extremely special day because it’s also the birthday of James Wong Howe, one of the most important film noir cinematographers and a huge influence to the band’s visual style. Although he passed away in 1976, Google is also celebrating his birthday with a daily Google Doodle, check it out!
“Pièce No. Trois” is one of seven songs that appears on the concept EP “Echoes From Forgotten Hearts“, released through Abridged Pause Recordings on February 14th of 2015. This music video is long overdue after having its fair share of disasters and lost footage over the years. Continue reading below for the full story about the making of “Pièce No. Trois“.
Don’t forget to find out how you can get a 10% discount on the t-shirts at the bottom of this news post!
In November of 2011, Alexandre Julien conceived the idea of filming a new video. Original plans hinted at the possibility of editing a music video for “Sometimes In Longing Narcosis“, the first song on Vision Éternel’s fourth EP “The Last Great Torch Song“; which was eventually released through Abridged Pause Recordings on March 14th of 2012.
Other ideas considered were a feature-length video spanning the entirety of “The Last Great Torch Song” with all five songs lasting fourteen and a half minutes; or a music video for “The Asphalt Jungle“, a twelve and a half minute song by Alexandre Julien’s other band Soufferance, which was eventually released on the concept LP “Memories Of A City“.
A pre-production photo shoot was set up at the old Dalhousie train station in downtown Montreal on December 3rd of 2011. The resulting film noir-influenced photographs by Jeremy Roux were issued as a promotional band photo shoot later that month. Principal photography started on the night of January 10th of 2012 with cinematographer Jeremy Roux. It was a freezing and windy night with temperatures hovering at an almost constant -10°C, omitting the wind factor. Jeremy Roux and Alexandre Julien headed to several of their favourite historical locations in the old quarters of Montreal in an attempt to photograph a comparable opening sequence to Woody Allen’s 1979 film “Manhattan” and Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film “Berlin: Die Sinfonie Der Großstadt“, with a heavy dose of 1940’s and 1950’s American film noir embedded.
The themes of Vision Éternel’s “The Last Great Torch Song” and Soufferance’s “Memories Of A City” were intertwined in this inspiring project intended as a dedication to Montreal’s forgotten days as a former Anglophone metropolis and one of the major ports flourishing in North America.
A key filming location was the former Dalhousie Station where the pre-production pictures had been snapped a month prior. Additional scenes were filmed nearby, above and under the Notre-Dame overpass and with the former Viger Station in the distance. Another shot was set up in the Saint-Dizier alleyway in the Old Port of Montreal which has old cobblestone paving and was wet from the melting snow and grainy from the salt, sand and rock pebbles used to deal with ice in the winter.
A few scenes were shot on Le Royer Street West, a rather fancy lane that looks more like a pedestrian park than a street, and on Saint-Pierre Street. There was also a landscape of Harbour City. Finally, this handful of astounding buildings were filmed within roughly the same block near the Old Port Walkway;
- the Hugh & Alexander Allan Office Building
- the John Young Monument
- the Montreal Harbour Commissioner Building
- the Customs House Building
- the Royal Bank of Canada Building
- the Elevator No. 1 and Silo No. 5 Structures
- the Five Roses Flour Factory Building in the distance
- parts of the Old Port railroad tracks, complete with a traveling train in the middle of the night
The first night’s work yielded thirty-six shots amounting to a little over twenty minutes of footage.
The plan was for three to five additional shooting days over the next two months until enough footage was accumulated. A return to Dalhousie Station, Viger Station, the Elevator No. 1 and Silo No. 5 Structures and the Royal Bank of Canada Building were also planned; with several more locations secured including:
- Windsor Station
- the Sun Life Building
- the Mount Royal Observatory and the Saint-Joseph Oratory
- Ravenscrag Mansion
- Redpath Mansion
- Dominion Square
- Dorchester Square
- the Pied-Du-Courant Prison Building
- the Montreal Harbour Bridge Building on Saint Helen’s Island
- the old mills on Visitation Island at the north shore of Montreal Island
Filming at these locations was postponed many times as Jeremy Roux became increasingly busy raising his family.
On March 14th of 2012, “The Last Great Torch Song” was released and two days later, Alexandre Julien and Jeremy Roux met up once again to film new footage at the Montreal Harbour bridge building. This session was exclusively used for the video introduction to “The Last Great Torch Song“.
On March 26th, less than two weeks after the release of “The Last Great Torch Song“, a hard drive failure caused a major disaster; all of the master audio files, the original artwork files and promotional content files (posters, flyers, etc) for Vision Éternel’s EP “The Last Great Torch Song” and Soufferance’s LP “Memories Of A City” were lost. The photographs taken on December 3rd of 2011 at Dalhousie Station, the photographs taken on March 4th of 2011 at Dominion Square, and every bit of video filmed on January 10th of 2012 were also lost. This tragedy was responsible for the cancellation of several promotional and merchandising plans and caused the music video to be shelved permanently.
Some of the promotional band pictures from March 4th and December 3rd of 2011 had been shared on social media websites and as a result of this, nine stills survived, though only in poorly compressed quality. The remaining photographs have never been found. Two months after the hard drive crash, on May 21st of 2012, twenty scenes from the January 10th 2012 video shoot were recovered (along with Soufferance’s LP “Memories Of A City“), amounting to a little more than half of the footage filmed. It took two years before the missing sixteen scenes were finally recovered, on March 14th of 2014. With the video footage found, many different plans were proposed but nothing materialized. A year later, after Vision Éternel had released its fifth EP, “Echoes From Forgotten Hearts” on February 14th of 2015, there was talk of editing the footage into a music video for “Pièce No. Sept“, considered as a lead single. But this never came together.
It took until the spring of 2017 for the idea of a video to be brought up again. A long-time fan and follower of Vision Éternel, Hong Kong-based visual artist Vasily Atutov, generously offered to work with the footage. By this time, another song from “Echoes From Forgotten Hearts” had taken over as the lead single, “Pièce No. Trois“, slightly shorter than “Pièce No Sept” but just as driving and engaging. Vasily Atutov edited the music video for “Pièce No. Trois” from July 22nd to July 23rd of 2017 and did a wonderful job, especially considering the limited selection of footage and its history. He has a sense of timing, mood and atmosphere that fits perfectly with Vision Éternel’s style. You can see more of Vasily Autotuv’s photography on Flickr and Instagram. He is now open to work with musicians on artwork and video editing, so get in touch with him at [email protected].
“Pièce No. Trois” premiered on The Obelisk webzine on August 28th. Mr. JJ Koczan has written a lovely commentary of the video along with his thoughts on Vision Éternel’s sound and style. You may read it here.
Want 10% off on your Vision Éternel webstore order?
All you need to do is head on over to YouTube, subscribe our channel, then “thumbs up” and comment on our brand new music video for “Pièce No. Trois”. Then simply send an email to [email protected] mentioning your support and we’ll email you back a 10% off discount code within the next 24 hours. The code can be used on any and all items in the store and will be calculated as a 10% off of the total price at checkout.
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