AC/DC’s video for “Realize,” the thunderous opening track of the hard rockers’ recent Power Up album, presents a closeup of the band in dizzying detail. The camera gets right in Brian Johnson’s face and perches on the headstock of Angus Young’s guitar as they rock out in front of Young’s deafening wall of Marshall amps — and then it spins in circles on the floor, aiming up at the Aussie hellraisers. Each frame of the clip is disorienting.
Now, Young and creative director Josh Cheuse are revealing how they made the video in a new behind-the-scenes mini-doc. In the doc, Cheuse explains that the way photographer Gavin Elder used a 360 camera during the band’s “Shot in the Dark” video shoot inspired Young. “I just looked at how it looked, and I saw that wide frame, and I thought it looked pretty good,” the guitarist says. “It looked different.”
AC/DC then hired co-director Clemens Habicht, who made the clip with Cheuse, to shoot some members of the band in Australia; because of the Covid-19 pandemic, each band member was shot individually, wherever he happened to be in the world at the time. But before they got to filming, Habicht made cutouts of the band members and stuck them in a diorama to show how it would look. “I just thought it was really cool,” Cheuse said in the clip. “I was like, ‘Oh this guy is as bonkers as we are.’”
“That’s about the best I’ve ever looked on a modeling outfit,” Young rejoined with a laugh.
The behind-the-curtains look includes a few shots of Young playing the song’s chords unplugged; it also demonstrates how they shot the band members one by one. Before Brian Johnson starts to sing, he proclaims, “This one’s a fucker.” And it’s on from there.
From Rolling Stone US
