Awesome piledriving visuals for Grammy-nominated French heavy metal outfit Gojira - with performance footage shot on a thermal camera - by Drew Cox, who directed, shot and edited the piece over a few days during the band's recent UK tour. The intensity, and broad variety of imagery, reflects both his and the band's state having suffered deep personal loss. 

DREW COX:

"The video is about contrast, light and darkness. The song was written by the band during a time after their mothers passing and I recently lost my younger sister and was trying to get my head around life and death and how there is always beauty even in the most destructive loss. I wanted the video to represent both the pain and beauty of loss. The light and the shadows.

"The camera we used was a Merlin thermal camera. The same one used on the new Planet Earth documentary series, filming Leopards in India. I loved the quality and contrast of the black and white imagery and the way it captured skin tones and the graduating body temperature changes, which allowed me to experiment with some interesting liquid techniques in the video. 

"Working with the Gojira is always an enjoyable and spiritual learning process. They have a very distinct eye for imagery and sound and they are extremely trusting at the same time, allowing me to create and experiment with the visuals. We shot this over a few days on one of their recent tours to the UK, on one weeks notice. They originally wanted just a simple, 'band in a rehearsal studio' type video, but with an abstract twist. I thought the camera would add something surreal and I had never seen it used in a band performance type video.

"After getting a quick rundown on the camera at a discreet military technology base, I decided to shoot the video myself as I had an idea of what I wanted it to look and feel like. On set I discovered the camera had a very specific built-in button to switch/invert the black and whites of the imagery, depending on what you want to represent the warmer and cooler areas of the image are. So by manually strobing this during performances I was able to create a basic effect of strobing lights, which really added to the effect of the camera and the brutality of the song.

"Everything was shot in camera, beside the extra visual effects shots which I created in post to build on the aesthetic of the song and the lyrics, and try to represent different elements of the idea of cells. Moving, changing, affecting, reacting, dieing away and being reborn."