Not long after the signing of the title track from HEMI's
debut album
"Fire in the Sky" onto
The Fixer was
the talk about producing a cross-promotional music video entered into everyone's
minds. Ultimately, an adajecent building to the band's rehearsal studio
was chosen for the shoot, and on September 7th of 2008, the video was shot
with director Nick Michalak, DP Eric Woltman, and gaffer Steve Vargas. While
David Alvarez was the bassist when the album was recorded, he had since departed
the band for the west coast, and now, frontman Trent Zuberi handled both
vocals and bass, as depicted in the video. With three cameras rolling
under the creative visual inspiration of Eric Woltman, all was wrapped in
a single day. After several weeks of editing and further input from
the band, a final version featuring clips from the film intercut with the
band's performance was set for release upon multiple platforms including
YouTube, MySpace, Spike.com, DailyMotion, and many more. Although stats
from some sites are no longer available, it has since gained over 17,000
views from the HEMI YouTube channel and all of RavensFilm Productions'
platforms.
The video was a major success launching HEMI's exposure to a whole new level, and giving RavensFilm a very special achievement amongst many years of struggles, including those with
The Fixer itself. A few months after its October, 2008 release, a performance only version of the video was assembled as well. In December of 2010, both Nick Michalak and frontman Trent Zuberi traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the Firestarter Films festival to screen the music video at the Harley-Davidson Museum, and were interviewed by Milwaukee Magazine (
archived here). Even after so many years, the song and video both remain special in the HEMI legacy, and even a new video was cut together for the band's
The Chosen Ones: Live in the Fire live album in 2014 with a new lineup. In 2018, the original video was remastered by cleaning up some of its filters in Final Cut Pro, and providing a higher resolution encoding to present it in its best possible quality.