Sing for Absolution: A 22nd Anniversary Film Cover

Capstone overview

Artist Statement

I set out to make a cover of a song. I finished realizing the song had been a cover of me.

Alexandré Zii Miller (2026)

Looking at the timeline now, the making of the cover ended up being the bigger piece. Sing for Absolution is a song about isolation and pressing through something you didn't choose, and the conditions I made it under ended up answering the song more honestly than I could have if everything had gone smoothly. The film is the deliverable. The experience of getting there is what the film turned out to be about.

The process of singing, the process of writing music and singing music, can almost be a form of absolution, really.

Dominic Howard, Muse (2003)

That line is the reason this capstone is a film cover and not a programming project or a research paper. While my classmates leaned toward systems and studies, Howard's framing of music-making as its own kind of absolution described something I wanted to actually do, not write about.

I also didn't want this to be another bedroom cover, where someone whips out a camera and records themselves playing along to the tracks on a guitar. I wanted to recreate the song with visuals that represented how I personally feel every time I hear it. That was the basis for the short-film treatment.

The project takes the form of a music video built around two parallel narratives: a warm interior band performance and a cooler exterior shot on location in Poland during winter. The same vocalist appears across both worlds, and across multiple selves within them, as the only performer in the cut with a fully visible face. The cover preserves the lyrics and emotional core of the song while reorienting its visual language toward self-introspection and isolation.

Project goals & success criteria

First, ship a complete cinematic film cover by the end-of-semester capstone deadline. Halfway through the project I realized that the song's 22nd anniversary fell on May 17, 2026, the same week as the capstone presentation. That coincidence wasn't in my original proposal at all. Once I caught it the capstone deadline doubled as a real public release date, and the whole thing became that much more important to finish on time.

Second, perform every part personally. The original Muse lineup is a three-piece; the cover replaces two of those instruments and adds two more (theremin, aerophone) for a re-arranged texture. None of these instruments, including lead vocals, were on a recording I'd released before. The cover would only count as mine if I tracked all of them.

Third, give the song the cinematic treatment the 2004 official video didn't get. The original's space opera CGI doesn't do the song the justice it deserves; the goal was to translate the song's themes (introspection, isolation, a kind of internal absolution) into a music video built on practical effects, cross-cut locations, and multi-self compositing, with the vocalist as the only fully visible face across every cut.

The criteria I defined for success with this project was: Did it ship on the date? Did I personally play every part? And did the finished cut land as a cinematic treatment rather than a karaoke performance?

Methodology

The capstone is the cover itself, not a paper about the cover. Everything that happened in execution became part of the deliverable itself.

The audio arrangement was rebuilt from scratch. I could not find any full score sheet music. I looked everywhere and only found guitar tabs and piano ensembles. The original Muse recording was run through LALAL.AI to extract isolated stems, each instrument line transcribed by ear from the clean stems, and the parts rebuilt instrument by instrument in Reaper. Lead vocals were tracked in dozens of layered passes (peaking at 41 takes) and comped down to a final lead and harmony stack.

I learned everything I needed as I went. Reaper and Premiere Pro from scratch. Drums, bass, theremin, and aerophone all tracked for the first time on this record. Vocal lessons in Wrocław with Weronika Ogonowska happened before anything was recorded.

Practical effects wherever I could pull them off. The interior set ran on real fog (FogWorx Extreme High Density fluid), a chandelier of Prince Rupert drop crystals, twelve battery-powered candle lanterns, and the house's existing Philips Hue ecosystem for ambient room light. The cross-cut structure (warm interior performance vs cool Polish winter exterior) was decided early and shot in two campaigns: a single coldest-day exterior shoot on January 11, 2026 at the Temple of Vesta Water Tower in Warsaw, and a later interior performance shoot at my home in Sarasota. Multi-self compositing was built up directly in the Premiere timeline.

Reflection

Having this anniversary deadline was good pressure. It forced me to stay in my lane and not pivot endlessly. If I can scope creep, I absolutely will. Tracking instruments live kept the performance lively even at the slower tempo. Practical fog and on-set lighting for the interior produced volumetric depth nothing in post could have replicated.

Initial editing in Premiere was painfully slow because I didn't know proxy footage existed. I learned about it on the final day of my capstone presentation, literally the last day I could have possibly learned about it. My CPU was grinding at 100% even at 1/4th timeline resolution.

The Fender Rumble 500 cost me an additional sixteen days without a bass line. Guitar Center wouldn't let me walk out with the amp on April 6, the day I bought it. Had to chill there on layaway.

Wardrobe was the bigger near-miss. The interior shoot was supposed to use the same white outfit I wore for the Poland snow exteriors, so the multi-self vocalist would read as one person across both cuts wearing the same clothes. After Poland I had so much luggage that I left the outfit in my hotel in China, planning to ship it back to the States. New US-China freight tariffs made shipping cost-prohibitive, so my mom flew out and physically picked it up. By the time the luggage was back with her, I was already in Florida with no way to get the original outfit to the interior shoot. The white designer jacket I'd happened to pick up in Moscow earlier in the month ended up filling the role.

As I reflect on everything behind me now, so much just happened to work out in the project's favor in ways I could have never anticipated. The anniversary alignment. Finding the perfect white blazer in Moscow. The glue and electrical tape I don't know why I threw in my carry-on last minute before heading out, but I did. The Antigravity A1, the first ever 360-degree goggle-based drone, releasing in China literally as I landed there.

This could have also become my personal tragedy. If Muse hadn't cancelled their Abu Dhabi show, I most certainly would have been a drone target. The neighborhood I booked a hotel in was hit. The unfortunate concert cancellation worked in my favor in a way I couldn't have known at the time. One of my favorite life quotes:

Everything happens for a reason, even if we don't yet realize the full extent of why.

What I'd do differently. Proxy footage pre-rendered from the beginning.

I ultimately shaved my beard off on the last day of class. Months of growing it out and dyeing it black, gone in just minutes. I thought I'd look younger but completely forgot I have my father's laugh lines. The mustache hid that quite well.

Comparable works & influences

Radiohead, "Daydreaming" (2016), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. A surreal, melancholic music video featuring Thom Yorke wandering through various interior spaces before emerging into a snowy mountain landscape. Long takes, natural lighting, minimal narrative. Symbolic, atmospheric, emotional minimalism. Doesn't have multi-self compositing.

Björk, "Army of Me" (1995). A visually aggressive music video featuring Björk navigating an industrial dystopia, culminating in her confronting a giant gorilla with a bomb. Practical effects, stark lighting, unconventional camera angles. Uncanny aesthetic, and the use of uncommon harmonic modes (Locrian, verse hangs on it). Not grounded in human vulnerability in an emotionally visible way.

FKA twigs, "Cellophane" (2019), directed by Andrew Thomas Huang. A pole-dancing performance piece featuring twigs descending through surreal environments from a strip club into an underworld. Long single takes, practical wire work, CGI environments. Vocally dominant, slow-building transformation, unusual foley and beats. Performance driven more than narrative driven, slight disconnect from vocals/visuals.

Two non-music influences. Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present (Museum of Modern Art, 2010). I like the vulnerability of her performance and wanted to capture that. Bill Viola, The Reflecting Pool (1977–1979). I love the unpredictable and extreme nature of it.