Let It Die

About

In May 2008 a music video for ‘Let It Die’ was commissioned with a treatment by director Martin Fougerol selected. Fougerol had previously jointly directed several music videos with Alexandre Courtès including U2’s ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes.

The treatment for the video was to involve traditional band performance footage miming to the song interspersed with scenes featuring a group of skateboarders. The story of the video would mostly follow the perspective of a girlfriend of one of the skaters, although further details are unclear.

The video was produced by Partizan who had worked on many popular music videos of the time and had worked with Fougerol previously. It was decided a specialist should be hired to arrange and shoot the skateboarding scenes and they initially approached Lance Mountain, one of the most prominent skateboarders of the 1980s who helped bring the sport into mainstream popularity and moved into video production in later years. Unfortunately, he was not available, but he recommended a friend, Grant Schubert.

A fellow skateboarder, Schubert was at the time known in the scene for his abilities to skate closely behind fellow boarders as they passed through several obstacles and capture impressive first-person style action footage.

It was Schubert’s first role outside of the skateboard world and he was somewhat anxious when he was given initial instructions. A group of skateboarders had been hired, and Schubert was to follow behind with a RED One camera to capture the footage. RED cameras were at the time very new and incredibly expensive so Schubert naturally asked whether he would be protected by insurance if anything were to go wrong.

They were not, and so instead it was decided that the shots would instead be attained by driving a van ahead of the skaters and have the director of photography (unknown) to hang out of the open doors at the back, a plan which amused Schubert as he felt it was “sketchier” than the original idea. Nevertheless, shooting commenced with the boarders riding around streets in LA, footage captured from the van as planned, as well as some more static shots captured by Schubert on his skateboard.

The actress (also unknown) playing the character of the girlfriend was also given a handheld camera to shoot footage, which would be mixed in with the professional RED camera footage, although both were meant to appear as if she filmed it.

Once the skating footage was in the can production moved towards the scenes featuring the band. They were to be inside a garage of one of the houses in the area where the boarders were active, performing the song. Schubert was given a Panasonic HVX handheld camera and told to shoot footage randomly, again meant to appear from the perspective of the girlfriend character.

Filming was wrapped up quite quickly and the video then moved into post-production, with an aim to release the video in June or July of 2008 – this never materialized. Schubert was unclear for why the video never materialized, but according to guitarist Chris Shiflett when later speaking to a fan it was simply decided that another music video and promotion cycle was not needed so deep into the album release.

Schubert had his own theories, alluding to friction between the director and others in the production, believing Fougerol struggled to put across his vision for the video and clearly explain exactly what he wanted. The song was released as a digital only single on June 24^th, 2008, with no video.

Schubert was asked to produce a “skate edit” from the footage which featured no scenes with the band and this edit was uploaded to his YouTube channel. The full video featuring the band remains unreleased.