We have a real movie on this set.
Steel Commanders. Yeah.
I like that. But I'm not gonna say it on camera.
It's with Sabaton. And I'm like, "Okay".
Do you really want me to answer this?
Sabaton in World of Tanks: Making Of
We started working with Sabaton back in 2017.
It started when we created a unique special style for the Swedish Strv 81
and used the track "Primo Victoria" in the Garage.
But, right at the beginning of our collaboration,
we understood that we wanted something more
and we were ready to create something even more interesting and exciting.
I mean, we were discussing around,
we needed a fast, cool, brutal song, we haven't done one in a very long time,
and we were also discussing together with Wargaming
how to follow up the success with that Primo Victoria tank.
And then the idea came about—
ok, maybe we should do another story in the game,
and this time do it with a new song.
And then it was quite complicated.
Like, how do you do a song
that is taking the whole concept of tanks and tank commanders into a few words.
Yeah, you're squeezing 100 years of mechanized warfare
into 4 minutes or something, or 3.5.
That's tricky business, I'll tell you that!
New Song
Both we and Wargaming, obviously, want this to be a Sabaton song,
so we're doing what's absolutely normal for us.
We did a song called The Future of Warfare on the latest album,
and this was the birth of tanks.
Now we have to write a song
that is about the continuation of tanks, the evolved tanks.
And its commanders.
We had to choose the tank battles very carefully,
because everything, I mean, from the fields of Prokhorovka,
which is obviously a hymn to the battle of Kursk,
and sometimes we chose them because they were important and iconic,
sometimes because they f*cking rhymed!
Sometimes it is that easy.
Spirit of War
First of all, Sabaton— the name "Sabaton"
comes out of a Medieval shoe that was used by knights.
So it's a natural thing that we decided to keep.
And also, we sing mostly about more recent battles and historical events.
But Sabaton sings about history, and we go back to the Medieval times as well
in some of the songs, and further back.
So, it is there.
And a tank and a knight have a similarity between them;
both are heavily armored for sure,
and both of them are always in the heat of the battle, so to say.
We had a rather difficult task:
We needed to connect knights, tank commanders, and our game, World of Tanks.
We tried to combine all these elements with a single story in this music video.
We started developing the plot for the music video a long time ago.
And we were working around different concepts
for the idea of the tank in a game.
And when we eventually came to the idea
that we’re gonna do something called "the spirit of war",
we started to work with different concepts,
like what is the spirit of war?
How does it look like, how does it feel, what does it do?
And eventually—how do we tell this in just a few minutes of footage?
The key element and the main idea of this music video is the Spirit of War.
It's an incorporeal substance that flies over battlefields
searching for the strongest warrior,
through which it can realize its power, strength, and energy.
And, as we can see at the beginning of the video,
the Spirit of War finds our knight and possesses him.
And you've seen the rest.
The script itself is pretty unusual.
The band loved it immediately
because it was really something neither us as a company nor the band
have ever done in their music videos— they never had such unusual stories.
When they told me about the project.
Okay, we gonna have knights, we gonna have battles in the 15th century,
we gonna have tanks through the ages, we gonna have all these explosions,
all of these VFX, and it's with Sabaton.
And I'm like, "Okay".
Unexpected Change of Plans
COVID, of course, was a big surprise for everyone.
In 2020, we initially planned to start shooting in the spring.
We had a script written, had chosen a director,
and gathered a team that would deal with the production itself,
but about a month before the shooting
was supposed to start, the world just stopped,
and everything closed down because of the pandemic.
At one point, I'm sitting here in Minsk, a little bit more than one year ago,
the director, Julian, was also here, but in a hotel room, where we couldn't meet!
So we were having calls in the same city.
Then we understood that, unfortunately,
it was impossible to shoot a music video the way we initially planned
under those conditions.
We had to look for a better opportunity to make it happen.
Filming the Music Video
In early 2021, we contacted the director and the band again,
started discussing our plans and the possibility
of releasing the project in the summer of 2021,
and then we started actively preparing for filming.
It took a long time to select a suitable place, city, location,
and time when the director, the band,
and our team could meet to organize the shoot.
We chose Minsk as the location,
and that's where we filmed the video in the middle of May.
We're musicians, first and foremost.
So, going out of your comfort zone into, all of a sudden, an actor,
you're really grateful to have a good production team behind it
and a good director who can really guide you through the whole process.
Because actors are called actors for a reason,
and musicians are called musicians for a reason, you know.
We built a whole story, a whole almost mythology
going from the 15th century to the WWII
where we explain and show this spirit of war,
how it evolved, how it goes from people to people and from tank to tank
and chooses who is the most valiant and skilled
and who deserves most to have that power.
And then we wanted to show the Strv K
in the coolest way possible,
and so automatically they both go hand in hand—
the spirit of war in the end chooses the Strv K, meaning it's the best one,
and through the whole film there's this culmination point
where the Strv K and Sabaton, which is its crew,
prevail and deserve ultimately the spirit of war.
I was playing the commander.
And that entails being grumpy, yelling at people,
so it comes naturally to me.
One of the hardest things is, I think,
when you're in the shot, but you're not the one in focus,
you're basically a prop in the background, and to act naturally then.
That's how I've been feeling for years, man.
Listening to the song is one thing, but working on the song is…
I don't know, the energy is… You cannot not like it.
It’s not even liking it, it pulls you up.
Many times, when I was working, I was grinning, just feeling the power of it.
My character, the loader.
I had to get into character, a big muscular guy,
very silent, doesn't say anything at all,
a lot of CGI.
And then at one point he actually
gets an opportunity to show what he's made of,
to bring those heavy shells, the ammunition, load it into the cannon.
And it was fun, you know, to play this, to do this character,
but, as Hannes was saying, we're not actors, we're musicians.
For this shooting, I get to be Hannes, in the back, in the tank,
sitting with my headphones on and listening to good music.
So I had a good feeling all the time, I was tuning in on the radio,
rock stations all over, listening to classic rock music.
No, there was nothing on the radio unfortunately,
but I had to pretend that there was
something good on the radio or interesting,
that I could give, relay the information,
like there's something coming at us or we're moving this way.
And, as you can hear, nobody wanted to be in the front, in front of the camera.
Everybody is like, "I love being in the back",
so who got the job sitting in front of the camera? This guy!
I got to be the driver, which was hilarious,
because I was sitting on a piece of brick, just jumping around,
but it was great fun, you know?
Artists like Sabaton, they give it all in the moment.
It's instant.
And that's how you get that energy, because it's direct—from them to you,
you listen, it's like there is no lapse.
But when you work in the movies, when you work where I do,
it's preparation for months, and months, and months.
You have to calculate, you have to organize…
So here, it's again my job to make that energy happen even though it's not direct.
We built all these things
and we arrange them in ways that visually you get that energy,
even though it's not something spontaneous, like when they're playing.
But we need to match that, we need to get that same spontaneity felt in our work.
So, it's a challenge.
First you walk in through this big factory, and my first thought was,
"Okay, there's some cameras in this old factory", you know?
And then you start looking.
Everything that's there is there for a reason.
And when the fire started to burn for the final takes,
I was standing kind of in the front
and I just looked around before we were shooting,
and I looked at Hannes, I was like
"This is probably the coolest set that you've ever been in."
Because everything around you was burning. Yeah.
Also I sat with my back against you for a long time,
enjoyed the view, until the director goes,
"Are you here?"—"Oh yeah, sorry."
Turned my chair around and ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.
It was a very long, hard day— a difficult rainy day in Minsk.
Filming basically lasted 24 hours.
All the time the band was on set, they had to act out every scene.
But they were amazingly professional and worked as hard as they could.
We hope that the energy they showed on set
will be visible to the fans of the band
and to our players through the music video.
Strv K and the 3D Style
The name of the band, Sabaton, speaks for itself.
It's a plated boot. And, of course,
the thing the plated boot is associated with is knighthood and knight armor.
This was our inspiration
when we created the visual image of the Spirit of War 3D style.
How would a tank carrying Sabaton, the spirit of war, and history of warfare,
all in one tank, how would it look like?
And this was something we were working on for such a long time.
But I think that the end result is like "There it is!"
It captures hard rock, it's a Sabaton tank,
it has some Swedish in it, it has a lot of Sabaton in it,
and there's a lot of heavy metal in it…
We wanted to pick an interesting vehicle for such a 3D style
and had to choose between several tanks.
Of course, we wanted it to be a Swedish tank,
and we knew our players would understand that, too.
The unique feature of this tank
is that it’ll be the first Tier IX Premium vehicle.
And the Sabaton tank in the game is the Strv K.
Actually, Strv K Spirit of War.
The same Spirit of War that we also have in the music video
appears in the game as well.
And that is how the story of it in the music video,
starting with a knight in the Medieval times,
traveling and eventually ending up in the Sabaton tank in the video,
and then it's introduced in the game.
So, when people are playing the game with the Strv K Spirit of War tank,
they could watch the music video
and understand where this Spirit of War comes from
and understand why it's shining like that.
Strv K Crew Voice Over
“So, guys, to Hell and back?”
“So, guys! To Hell and back?!”
When we did the Primo Victoria tank, I did a lot of voiceovers.
I did them on my own in a hotel room when we were on tour.
However, this time I had producers of the game there, and they helped a lot.
And I've got to say it was much more fun this time,
because, obviously, when joking around or testing things,
if I'm alone in a hotel room,
I don't know how far I can take it, you know?
Can I make a joke here or should I just do the line strict?
And when having the producers there,
them telling me, "More! Harder! Stronger! Louder! Prouder! Sad!", whatever it is,
it makes a huge difference in how fast you can do it,
how good the end result is going to be,
and then especially with all the sort of Easter eggs,
I mean, if you're a Sabaton fan
and you're playing the game with me as the commander,
there's a lot in there
that people who aren't familiar with Sabaton aren't going to get.
World of Tanks meets the band Sabaton again.
Something new is coming.
The Spirit of War game event will take place in World of Tanks
from August 27 through September 6.
You all know the rules: 10 days, 10 stages.
And the main reward—
a Tier IX Premium tank, the gorgeous STRV K.