Your humble blogger is under deadline pressure, but two spectacular music videos with local connections have fallen into my lap to bring you this week.

Above you see “Harbingers,” the title track of the recently-released new album by Byzantine.

About this video, Byzantine’s guiding light, Chris Ojeda, says:

This video has taken months for us curate. We wanted to continue our path of handmade original artwork for this new album.

My daughter Mallory Ojeda and I wrote the script for the story, hired a young Claymation artist from Mexico named Adrian Venti to hand build every scene out of clay and brought Holly Grayson with Screaming Butterfly Entertainment (Justinian Code, The Cicada Tree, The Agonies) to edit all the footage to make this beautiful music video about a boy who, after losing his father, searches for his importance in life, only to be lured in by a voracious Wolf who steers the boy down a path of greed and selfishness. The boy is eventually saved by one random act of kindness towards a lone Raven. Ravens never forget.

Mallory and I are fans of all things stop motion. Movies like Fantastic Mr. Fox, Coraline, James And The Giant Peach, and music videos from Peter Gabriel, Bjork, Tool, and Primus. We modelled the main character after my six-year-old son, Henry. I hope you guys enjoy this labor of love and appreciate the amount of work and symbolism that has gone into the script, the Claymation, and the brilliant editing. Our team decided to push the creative aspect as far as we can and tell this story of a boy who just wants to be important.

As you can see, it’s an amazing piece of work.

Another amazing piece of work is at the bottom of this post.

It’s the second collaboration between Sirius Bluray and my old friend (and RFC fave) David Synn, called “The Oak Tree.”

I don’t have as much info about the production, but it’s a terrific piece of music and great video, so we get the rare treat of having two locally-connected music videos turn up within a day of each other.

Check it out…