Combining both live action and VFX, the video for Alagoas’ new song Ghosts by directors DVEIN creates an eerie atmosphere of ritual, celebration, and deception. Drawing inspiration from the song’s lyric, “We’ll be the West when it was one,” the storyline depicts Manifest Destiny through the perspective of Native Americans by way of abstract symbolism. An ancient settlement is amazed to find a vibrant, animated alien creature crawl out of a spaceship, naive to the fact that he is a Trojan Horse for the concept of settling the American West.
The lyrics of the song were written on a roadtrip through the desert of Northern Spain “that recalled them to the first settlers in the West of the U.S. and that is actually known for being the location of some of the Spaghetti Westerns from the 70s,” Alagoas’ Wilson Brown tells The Creator’s Project. “The song is about the broad idea of Manifest Destiny, exploration, and exploitation of people and resources, building and leaving behind. And was somewhat inspired by how the area around Zaragoza reminded us of the American West.”
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The inspiration of the video came from an 1872 painting by John Gast titled, American Progress, where Columbia, a giant woman, leads the settlers into the dark West with their new technology and ideals.
“Ghosts” is off of the indie pop band’s self-titled 2014 EP. Go behind the scenes of the video in the images below:
See more of DVEIN’s work on his website, and buy the rest of Alagoas here.
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