Medieval folklore brings professor from Allentown, his students overseas to produce epic music video | Allentown Area

ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A university professor from Allentown, inspired by a centuries-old tale out of Iceland, took his yearly music video project to epic proportions.

It’s not unusual for Barry Atticks to produce a show with his students.

“Every year we shoot a winter’s music video at Millersville,” Atticks, the university’s associate professor of music industry, said.

The videos are not always conventional.

“They have done some crazy things,” Isabella Dayton, a freshman, and one of Atticks’s students, said. “They’ve gone into cemeteries. They’ve done live snake scenes.”

But this time, the Millersville University professor from Allentown learned a tale from medieval folklore, enticing him overseas.

“It’s like a story kind of similar, like Santa Claus,” Dayton said, “like, you better watch out.”

But this one makes it just slightly more terrifying to be on the naughty list.

“This cat was actually two stories tall,” Atticks said.

The cat sniffs out the kids who didn’t work hard enough to get to wear new clothes, and eats them.

“You better watch out,” Dayton said, “because the Icelandic cat is going to come and eat you.”

Atticks says it was supposed to be a way for parents to encourage their children to work hard during the school year.

“But in fact, so many kids were traumatized that the Danish government banned the story,” he said, “for a few hundred years.”

Atticks conveyed all this in an epic seven-minute music video called Jólakötturinn, which means Icelandic Yule Cat.

The students wrote and performed the music. Dayton, a freshman out of Easton, played the children’s protector.

“My role is Freya, which is the Icelandic goddess of love and war,” she said.

The school teamed up with a professional production crew, In the Wee hours, to produce a musical masterpiece that’s won multiple awards at various film fests, taking home both Best Musical Video and Best Short Film, among many other honors.

“I was just so shocked that they even had this kind of experience for us,” Dayton said.

The musical short film will soon play at ArtsQuest in Bethlehem, though a date has not yet been set. You can watch it for free here.

“Make sure to give it a like though,” Dayton said. “We need all the views.”

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}