Vanderlust is a melodic metal band from Italy, formed in 2019. Describing themselves as “cosmic metal,” Vanderlust's albums feature lyrical themes of space travel, astronomy, space engineering, and sci-fi adventures. For their debut release, I was tasked with handling all the graphics, from album covers to booklets to official music videos.

Given the song's theme, the band requested the video to faithfully replicate the story told by the lyrics.

The spaceship design combines a stereotypical futuristic style—typical of various famous video games and sci-fi movies—with a slightly retro touch to outline the narrated future in a time relatively close to ours.

The production of the music videos for "High Hope" is a collaboration between Lorenzo Gestri and Luca Manfredi. Luca, a young and promising videomaker, was responsible for shooting real-life footage of the band playing on a rocky Mars-like red planet (filmed at Cava Rossa of Monsummano, Tuscany). He also handled video editing and all the greenscreen shots used later in some of Lorenzo's 3D shots, depicting the Vanderlust spaceship bending space-time to reach Ares, a fictional tidally locked exoplanet orbiting a distant three-star system (to avoid potential future copyright issues using real Mars photos, we opted to change our "astromusicians" final destination).

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