Project
Kepler Ten are a three piece prog rock band that I first met at Wokingham Festival.
I was really impressed by their musical virtuosity as I watched them play whilst I videoed their live performance.
They in turn liked the live performance videos that I had created, and asked me to get involved in a promotional video to support the release of a new album - A new kind of sideways
The track that they wanted promoted was called "Weaver" and they sent over an MP3 of the track and we started to talk about treatments
The song is based around a wasp that hijacks a spider's nervous system for its own ends
The album went on to win the prestigious Music in Widescreen - best album 2020 award
Influences
There's nothing subtle about the way in which the Reclinervellus nielseni wasp larva takes control of the Cyclosa argenteoalba spider's nervous system.
First, an adult female wasp must attack a spider so it can lay an egg on the spider’s abdomen. When the egg hatches, the wasp larva feeds itself by sucking on the spider’s hemolymph — the insect equivalent of blood. This is probably where the mind control starts to happen; researchers think the larva "injects" the spider with substances that alter its web-building behaviors.
So, when the larva’s done growing, it manipulates the spider into making a special type of web. As soon as the task is complete, the larva molts, kills the spider, and spins the altered web into a hanging cocoon that it can chill in for about 10 days while it develops.
The analogy that the band wanted to draw was that maybe governments, or large corporations had hijacked human behaviour for their own ends.
So insects and control had to be included
Alongside that, we agreed that a device which had featured in a previous video should be re-introduced
And finally, on top of that the phrase "Round and Round" features in the song, so that had to be included.
It was a great fun weaving(See what I did there?!) these elements together and creating the Weaver video as part of a large, multi-faceted PR campaign organised by their record label - White Star Records