Here's the transcript of Amy's commentary.
The text was downloaded from the YT subtitles, I made it for myself so i can translate it later for my Ev site but i think that other non-us/uk fans might maybe appreciate it too (i remember how hard it was for me to understand the videos at first!). See also on the Evthreads.
Who Will You Follow - The Making Of
Amy: "So, let's make a music video... Who will you follow? 🤪
When we were writing Who Will You Follow, I remember we were specifically talking about social media as a vampire. How it sucks your soul and your energy. And we don't want to disengage, but what we really want is real connection and honesty. I think people are sick of feeling like they're being used and lied to. We are being exposed to things that we don't want to be true. But if we can't face them, then the monsters win.
So, the idea of the video is that there is this dark and painful reality seeping through the cracks that we have to face, that we need to face. It's coming through regardless of what we want to be true. And so, this is about that darkness and being brave enough to face it. You can't fix a problem until you face it.
As soon as I started visualizing ideas for the music video, immediately and only I thought of Jensen. We met doing the End of You video with Poppy and Courtney LaPlante. Jensen is an artist. He has a very meticulous eye, he focuses on every detail in a way that I completely relate to and he likes to shoot things a lot of times in a lot of ways from a lot of different angles [laughs]. So, when you're seeing just a few seconds of a piece of work he's done, know that he spent hours getting those few seconds. I think Jensen and I are a lot alike and we really get each other coming up with ideas, dreaming things up, listening through the song, talking through it with him, and then watching some of those specific ideas come to life. So cool. He has an incredible way of creating other worlds and I wanted our video to be about another darker world breaking through.
We were downtown, shooting in the middle of an intersection downtown LA, blasting the music from like 9:00 till around midnight. People live around there. A lot of it is businesses but there's residents too, and people in apartments were getting sick of it. I think people were digging it at first. We got a lot of people standing on street corners filming on their phones. We're all dying inside because we know they're seeing it at double speed and sharing on the internet super confused as to what's wrong with our new music. But, I digress.
Doing everything at double speed feels awkward at first. I remember when we were first making music videos, I felt so stupid. I kept like, you know, breaking character [laughs]. It doesn't really phase me anymore. I know how cool it's going to look in slow motion, and I'm just imagining that.
All of the actors we had on set for this video, I think we had 40 actors. I think that's maybe the most we've ever had for an Evanescence video. And they were all incredible. You see a lot of scenes where there's just a lot of people in the background. That is our same crew of actors in every part. The walking through the street part, us in the elevator. 40 actors, not including the 12 rats, to be clear.
The rats were the real stars of the show. I had two big ideas that really shined through. One was the elevator, and the other was the rats. In our treatment notes and ideas and revisions back and forth, I mentioned to Jensen that I thought that the second verse had a striking visual built right in with the "rats in the wall are already coming through" and that I just wish I could see a split-second visual of that and my thought originally just was that, you know, three-second moment some rats would scurry around my feet. Of course, that couldn't be simple. Can't just round up some rats, set some traps, set them free. You have to hire trained rats and handlers, which were all fantastic to work with, by the way. It came down to the final decision of, "Amy, are you really sure you want to do the rats? The rats are going to be, uh $2500." And I was like, "Hell yeah, I want the rats!" [laughs] Best decision I ever made. One little moment turned into an afternoon with rats. We enjoyed the rats so much, we invited them for dinner.
Zakk Cervini, our producer on the track, did a cameo in the lounge scene. Secret Easter egg. We thought it'd be fun for Zakk to come by and do a cameo and he actually did make time for that. And like I said, Jensen likes to shoot things a lot of times from a lot of angles, so yeah, he had to hold that drink for like 4 hours.
The hardest part at the end of the video is leaving and knowing you're not going to get to see an edit back for a couple of weeks. We've been working on this music literally for years and it has been very consuming for me and I am just so so so excited to finally share it with our fans around the world. I know they're going to love it."
💜