Within Temptation performing in 2011 at the Paradiso in Amsterdam
Video albums
4
Music videos
37
The Dutch symphonic metal band Within Temptation has released four video albums and has appeared in twenty-nine music videos and three short films. From their first EP, The Dance (1998), they released an animated music video for the song "The Dance". The first live action video came after the release of their second album, Mother Earth (2000), for their national hit single "Ice Queen" (2001). The single generated two videos, the second one coming only two years later, in order to give the song a better worked music video due to the single newfound international rotation. The second version was directed by frequent heavy metal video director Patric Ullaeus, who had already worked with the band for their "Mother Earth" video.
Besides their music videos, the band has released four video albums and appeared in several television shows, mainly in their home country.
Music videos
Former Nightwish singer Tarja Turunen appeared on the "Paradise (What About Us?)" song and music video (2013)Rapper Xzibit collaborated with the band for the song "And We Run" (2014) and its music video
The video features a woman who, while searching for the band on the internet, finds a performance of the band performing the song at the Pinkpop Festival.
It follows the band playing inside a forest, as lead vocalist Sharon den Adel walks with a dress by the trees, in allusion to the song lyrical themes. An owl is also seen flying through the woods and a river.
The video features heavy use of CGI.The band members are seen performing alone in various settings, as such as high technology factory, a platform with thunders, the stars and the sun itself. The band altogether, then, plays at the surface of an orange planet.
As a couple enters a church, they cansee the band playing at the altar for a crowd. An angel version of den Adel enters the church and possesses the body of band's den Adel, who starts to levitate as the crowd contemplates in awe. The angel then leaves den Adel's body, and the band resumes playing.
Lead vocalist den Adel enters a room and opens a secret device from which comes an old book. As she reads the book, she learns that a flood is coming from the result of a heavy rain. With the knowledge she earned from it, she manages to find an old ark that can save all band members, and they can be seen sailing through a great ocean at the end of the video. As the history flows during the video, the band is seen playing as a whole on the rooftop of a building while the storm falls and the water floods the world.
As an elderly woman enters an old and abandoned mansion, she turns into her younger self and walks the house while remembering her old love and how the house was before its ruin. She then turns to her old self again and leaves, as the house falls in disrepair. The band can be seen playing with fancy clothes and old instruments in the mansion concert room, and with their typical clothing and modern instruments in other scenes.
It tells the story of a group of vigilante angels who make it their mission to wipe out evil. den Adel is a woman who has been seemingly abandoned on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. She accepts a lift from a priest, who takes her back to his home. The priest is in fact a demonicserial killer, who adopts different disguises to get to his victims. All of these disguises are seemingly trustworthy people, like a doctor, a police officer, a clown, judge, or a priest. As den Adel stumbles upon a board full of newspaper clippings in the killers home, which are about his previous victims, he seemingly overpowers her with chloroform. He takes her all tied up to the middle of the desert to bury her alive. However, den Adel immediately awakens as the other band members approach as angels, and she is revealed to also be one of them, who was left at the side of the road as bait for the serial killer. The killer, then, is confronted with the spirits of his other victims, who destroy him. The vigilantes then move onto their next target.
Mina (then Keith) Caputo is an FBI agent who has been assigned the task of capturing den Adel, a spy and his former lover. Caputo searches for den Adel, finally locating her singing with the band at a bar in Thailand; however, he is thrown out by the bouncer and is refused re-entry. She makes her way through a jungle in the next scene, with Caputo following her. After reaching a cliff with no escape, den Adel faces Caputo and whispers "I love you." She turns and jumps off the cliff. Although Caputo is under the impression that den Adel did not survive the fall, at the end she is lying on rocks, smiling.
The video follows a couple having a violent fight. As the couple screams at each other, den Adel leaves and gets a cab, while her partner is left behind thrashing their apartment, smashing mirrors and breaking vases.
The video portrays an alcoholic man who uses to beat and presumably rape his wife and daughter, and ens up getting killed by a poison slipped into his drink by the first. The wife, as a result, is put in jail and possibly sentenced to death. At the beginning and in the final moments of the video, she is shown writing a letter to her daughter. The video also features the band playing the song in the living room of the family's house, and den Adel picks up and holds the daughter's doll at the end of the video.
The video follows den Adel as she walks in a beautiful, sunlit field in front of a mansion. As a butterfly lands into her hands, it quickly turns into a dark scorpion and the world surrounding her gets darker, with a lot of wreckage, crows, destroyed houses and burning cars. Den Adel is joined by the other band members in the darker scenes as the video progresses alternating between the two versions of the world.
Situated mainly in a dream world, the video consists of travel through the mind of den Adel's character, where she follows a mysterious hooded figure. She walks past a moving statue, a horse in a corridor, a sad ballerina, among other surrealistic beings and environments. Her characters is shown to be in a coma at the end of the video, with images from the dream sequence flickering on a screen connected to her mind via wires. The band is shown tied to walls of their cells.
A man walks around a city witnessing various people committing crimes, such as a man stealing a blind woman's wallet and a prostitute being picked up by an older man. He saves a child from almost being hit by a car when his mother wasn't paying attention to what he was doing. As the boy looks back, there is nobody there, suggesting that the man was an angel-like apparition. The band is also seen performing in a run down building.
The official video contains scenes from the Mother Maiden short film mixed with scenes of the band performing the song at an old hangar. The version featured after the end of the short film only contains scenes of the band playing at the hangar.
A woman named Sinéad (introduced at the Sinéad short film) enters a night club hiding two weapons at her back. As she finds her target, she shoots him and causes the attenders to flee. Another target hides from the shots, until she is able to locate and render him. The band is seen playing at the club.
The music video follows the story of a fallen angel who cuts its wings becomes human due to its weakness on fighting and suffers from it, while intertwining with live footage from the band performing the song at the Lowlands music festival.
In a wasteland, two people are seen in heavy protective gear walking through various parts of a ruined civilization, searching for what appears to be parts of a machine. Once the parts are found, they eventually drag the pieces up a sandy slope, where they activate a bigger machine by assembling the smaller parts, sending a big beam of light to the skies causing rain to fall. As the wasteland begins to show some signs of life, the two characters remove their headgear, and are revealed to be two young girls. Some time later, a rich jungle is seen as Tarja and Sharon, implied to be "druids" many many years later, paying homage to the machine and the terraformers who sacrificed to set up the machine and create the world in which they now live. They leave and the red light on the machine goes out, having completed its purpose the machine dies as the world is now self sustaining..
The video focus on the renowned skydiver Jokke Sommer performing gliding through the air and pulling off impressive stunts such as navigating through a narrow gap between two buildings, over Lapa and around Sugarloaf in Rio de Janeiro. The video features Howard Jones singing on the Esplanade Riel, as the band performs in a large room with lights wearing dark clothing.
A drunk man is seen having a motorcycle accident. The video progresses as he struggles to heal himself at a hospital, and lately manages to drop his addiction. Den Adel and Pirner (or Rogucki in the polish version) are seen singing at the rooftop of the hospital.
The video opens with a Nelson Mandela quote that reads: "Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement". Xzibit is seen bound to a chair with tubes inserted into his skin, inside a dark industrial area, which is filmed in black and white. The band are shown performing somewhere outside in a floating, colorful world that resembles ruins. A hummingbird flies past the band and towards the industrial area where Xzibit is being held. It lands in Xzibit's hand, and he looks at it before one of the tubes attaches to the bird, absorbing its color and killing it. Xzibit breaks out of the chair and leaps out of the building. In between scenes of him escaping and the band playing, he is shown rapping in a black room. He approaches a giant wall and punches his way through it, and as it breaks the sunlight pours through and shines on him, filling the area around him with color. He feels the sunlight, and so does den Adel, and it is implied that they will find each other once Xzibit escapes.
The video features the band walking through a desert-like landscape in a dystopian future. The band runs off through a number of machines which aims and fires red laser beams at them during the process. After three members manage to escape the threat, an alien spaceship tries to abduct lead vocalist Sharon den Adel, as two of the remaining members are able to save her by attacking the spaceship with blue streams of energy coming from their white flags, while also defeating the threat.
A^ The main music videos are attached to their respective short-films.
B^ There are two versions of the video, one featuring Dave Pirner as guest and the other featuring Piotr Rogucki. The storyline, although, is composed by the same scenes.
C^ Although Shaddix appears on the song, he is absent from the music video.
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