Open Window’s Close Your Eyes: Keeping the Band in View

Gabriele Bussetti

7 days ago

4 min read

Behind-the-scenes photo of Open Window performing on the set of the “Close Your Eyes” music video, with the camera crew and rows of glowing lights behind the band. — Behind the scenes of Open Window’s *Close Your Eyes* music video (2025).

A camera rises above the crew at the left of a photograph from the set of Open Window’s Close Your Eyes. Three musicians stand near a microphone across the center of the image; the drummer sits farther to the right. Behind them, rows of round lamps extend up a corrugated metal wall.

BGM Film produced the music video in 2025. The photograph widens our view of that work, taking in the camera and crew that a performance image usually leaves outside its edges. It is a useful starting point for reading Close Your Eyes: a band appears on screen through individual faces and instruments, while the making of both the music and its image involves people beyond any one close-up.

The Story Behind the Song

The song emerged from a renewed period of writing. Open Window says it began writing again in 2024, and Close Your Eyes was the first song it wrote after returning. Vocalist Daniel E. Bautista describes a beginning with a riff from guitarist James S. Rutherford. Daniel tried vocal melodies and words against it, developing the verses and chorus before bringing the material back to James and bassist Wayne Rothstein.

The work continued between them. James and Wayne contributed to the transitions and bridge, extending the song beyond that initial exchange between riff and voice. The band describes its subject as a journey that takes someone away from a loved one, perhaps for good. Those accounts give the music its own history of decisions and contributions. They concern the song’s creation and subject, without prescribing a story for the video.

One Band, Many Perspectives

That history changes the weight of an ensemble image. Each musician belongs to a piece of music that has passed between people. A face may draw our attention first; the band around it gives that attention somewhere further to go.

The video’s views of the ensemble, musicians, faces, and instruments offer different ways into that relationship. A closer face can bring expression forward while reducing our sense of the surrounding activity. An instrument detail directs attention toward playing, sometimes at the expense of the player’s expression. Keeping both within an image allows us to connect them. A close-up draws our attention to one musician. The other members can be out of frame even when their work is central to the song.

Light, Space, and Presence

In the set photograph, the lamps place the performers within a common visual pattern. The circles repeat behind several musicians, against the finer repetition of the metal ridges. Their warm appearance meets a setting with hard surfaces and an exposed structure. That combination resists an automatic equation between warm light and comfort. Here, warmth can be read as one element of a performance environment with texture and contrast. When the frame tightens, a whole row might give way to a single bright circle beside a face. The surroundings then have a different weight, even when their color remains familiar.

The photograph also gives the camera a physical presence that the finished image tends to conceal. Its position is occupied by equipment and people, on the same floor as the band. A tight view of a musician can leave the crew and the space around the camera outside the image. The wider photograph shows that working space alongside the band. BGM’s production credit identifies the company’s contribution to the video; Open Window’s music credit preserves the band’s authorship. The photograph allows both kinds of work into view, without making one stand in for the other.

The Power of the Edit

Those relationships continue across images. A photograph holds everyone in place for as long as we look; a video sets the duration of each view and connects it to others. If an ensemble view precedes a close-up, the group can remain part of our understanding of the person. If the order is reversed, the later image can change our sense of where that person belongs. These are possibilities of editing, rather than a reconstruction of Close Your Eyes’ cuts. They locate part of a performance video’s meaning between shots, where an individual image borrows context from the work around it.

Beyond the Frame

An image’s use can remove that context again. Cropping this set photograph around the musicians would leave much of the camera and crew outside the picture. Cropping it around one face could also remove the other players. In either case, the source photograph would remain unchanged, but the public account of the work would narrow. A short excerpt from a video could make a similar change by omitting the images before and after it. A person encountered alone in a feed might therefore appear more solitary than the same person within the complete performance. The version has changed the relationship we can see.

This makes the complete work a different encounter from any image chosen to represent it. Open Window’s Close Your Eyes carries a song shaped by several musicians into a video where attention can move between the group and the individual. The set photograph keeps the act of filming within that company. It invites us back to the video with a fuller sense of who is present: the musician before the camera, the band beyond the close-up, and the people making it possible to look.