A business in Jefferson is once again receiving honors for a recently completed project.

Art of Aries Studios announced that their production of the music video “Infinite Battleground” was selected for the 2024 Iowa Independent Film Festival. This accomplishment comes off the two awards Art of Aries Studios won at the Iowa Motion Pictures Awards for Award of Achievement for Direction and Award of Excellence for Editing.  

Art of Aries Studios Co-Owner Tyler Gathercoal is the producer and engineer, and also plays drums in the band Through the Darkness that performed the song that was made into the award-winning music video “Infinite Battleground.” He explains that he figures out how the band shots need to happen with doing a music video by knowing what the song is about through pre-production to executing each scene.

“We filmed that perfectly. We even had a checklist for that music video for ‘Infinite Battleground’ making sure that we can get everything done in a timely fashion. And what I do is I actually create a filming itinerary for every single project, whether it’s music videos and social media ads. Just because like if we don’t have an itinerary we could spend four hours on something that should’ve taken two (hours) and then we’re out of time for today.”       

Gathercoal says the rest of the music video concepts are handed off to his brother, Kris who is the director and co-0wner of Art of Aries, and their cinematographer Tollef Sorensen. Tyler points out that Kris does the acting pre-production.

“He is the guy that does all of the storyboarding, he does all of the film concepts, and he does all of the angles for all of that storytelling side of things. Tollef is just behind the camera making sure that he captures it, but the nice thing is Tollef and Kris work so well together that like Tollef will say like, ‘Well the lighting is bad here, so we need to try to move an angle here,’ and Kris is like, ‘Okay, well let’s do this.’ And so we have the director and the cinematographer are working well together and that’s how we’ve won many awards because they both have complimentary ideas. 

Other members of “the crew” of Art of Aries Studios include Brett Bojack as the Chief Engineer, and Derek Austin and Chaz Wessels are studio musicians. Tyler adds that “Infinite Battleground” is about the internal struggle people have to make choices of what they are going to invest themselves in, and in the song it is finding motivation through a hobby or a job. Tyler says the music video, which was entirely filmed in Greene County, will be released on September 6th.