Sebastiaan Spijker

Best known for his fast-paced, dynamic visual style, Sebastiaan Joachim Spijker was born on April 26, 1979, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Over the course of decades of shooting music videos, he has gone from low-budget videos to working with some of the greatest Dutch metal musicians known worldwide. At an early age in high school, he picked up filming by shooting stop motion videos using his father's analog camera and evolved experimenting with short length stories. Pursuing his passion for combining human-machine interaction, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Twente before switching to Digital Media Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Inspired by Sepultura's music video Refuse/Resist, he started his music video career while still attending art school, by recording Pitfall: Lower Level (2001) with his former high school classmates who played in the band. After graduating with a master's degree in arts, while working part time as a multimedia designer, he continued to direct music videos, increasingly focusing on the rock and heavy metal genres. After recording Nightqueen: Lady Fantasy (2011) his work started to progressively incorporate visual effects, amending to the storytelling of the artist statements portrayed in the music videos, such as with Robby Valentine: Black Rain (2015). His approach to music video from a lyrical and conceptual perspective led from shooting on the banks of the river Styx in Spartan: Elysium (2015), to burning a hotel room in Cate Rox: Flames (2016) to dropping someone strapped in a seat from an airplane in Resurrect Tomorrow: Slaver's Crown (2018). After recording dozens of live performances, producing after movies for some of the largest metal festivals in The Netherlands and recording internationally acclaimed Sinister: Neurophobic (2017) Spijker gained traction with major metal bands. By keeping the camera in constant motion, combined with his unique fast paced cutting, Spijker has created a highly dynamic visual style, which is very noticeable in Bleeding Gods: From Feast to Beast (2017), For I Am King: Devotion (2018) and Izegrim: Retraumatized (2019). With the release of the triptych for God Dethroned he gained a strong foothold in the genre, earning recognition from the metal scene. Among other channels, his music videos can be seen at Nuclear Blast, Metal Blade records and Massacre records.