Interview with Shreya Chengappa – The artist behind the Chaos music video
We’re knee-deep in the age of AI slop. And this was the perfect time for Chaos to make a strong statement against this with their music video by teaming up with artist Shreya Chengappa to release a hand-drawn animated video for “Age of Extinction” from their third album Bane of Humanity. Headbangers India caught up with Shreya to discuss the video, how long it took her to draw out all those frames, her previous work with the band and more.
The music video opens with our good old friend Mickey Mouse, and shots from Steamboat Willie that take quite a drastic turn with splatters of red, as the monochromatic animation becomes bloodstained. When asked how she got the idea of using this paradox of a happy animation in a metal song, Shreya says- “ I had actually put out this idea saying that I wanted to do a hand drawn animation. I’ve been wanting to do something like that. And when we were discussing this, Steamboat Willie had come into the public domain and we thought that would be a great idea. And the song “Age of Extinction” fit the theme. So we just got on with the idea.” As for the brutal version of a kids’ cartoon, we asked who came up with the concept, and she gives equal credit to the band as well as herself. “I think it was a combined thing. See, metal is usually brutal, right? The art especially. So it just came by. We were anyway planning to do something brutal. So we did this together.”
AI fatigue is real, and as a viewer, watching something hand-drawn like this was cathartic to an extent, and so refreshing. I honestly thought she’d done this with the members of Chaos to make a strong statement against this, but it just looks like their release could not have been timed better – though the process started way back. “How AI is taking over is crazy, but it was not because of AI that we were doing this”, she says. “I just wanted to do a hand-drawn animation. I really like the process of, you know, drawing and putting it together. It’s very raw and timeless, right? All hand-drawn solutions are timeless.”
She added that they just wanted it to be real. “Now that AI is taking over things, maybe people will like something different.”
And if you think it was churned out in the span of a few weeks, you’re wrong. “It took around 3 years. Planning and ideating, storyboarding and the animation took time. Each frame is hand drawn and hand painted.” And mind you, there are around 600 frames!
(Spoiler alert) “There’s animation and we also did a collage part in the end where the head explodes. That entire scene was also put together with each frame, so it was very time consuming,” says Shreya, who also admits that the final output after all this time and effort was so satisfying. “I would love drawing each frame and then when I looked at it animate, I would just light up. It motivated me to do the next scene, and then the next… you know?”
This is not Shreya’s first work with Chaos. She had also worked with the band on their previous music video for “Curse of Chaos”. She did the art direction and costumes for the video, and made the masks out of papier-mâché. It took her about five days to prep the masks, work on the mood board and also draw out the costumes.
Shreya has been a practising full-time artist for about a decade now. She’s worked on paintings and murals and has also participated in multiple exhibitions over the years. She’s also a metalhead and is currently exploring various sub-genres of metal, including grindcore, when she’s not spinning some Blues tracks.
Chaos’ Bane of Humanity was released on August 1, 2026, and was produced, mixed and mastered by Keshav Dhar, with artwork by Kidsquidy. The band’s previous albums are Violent Redemption (2013) and All Against All (2018).
Watch the video here: