My Chosen Artist

In this entry I will be expanding on this post, which I created at an earlier stage in my planning. I think it is important to give more explanation as to why I chose them over other artists and why I chose Light Up The Background in particular.

The Lafontaines are a Scottish hip-hop/rock/pop band from Motherwell. There are five members, including two vocalists (one that sings and one that raps), a bassist (the singer), two guitarists and a drummer. They were unsigned when I chose to use them in my coursework. I had seen them at a gig supporting the band 3OH!3 in November 2012 at the Waterfront in Norwich. I bought their CD from the merchandise table, had some pictures taken with some of the band members (see right) and they soon became one of my favourite artists.
During the time I was trying to decide which artist to do, we moved house and we were looking at a house which I felt would be great for 'Wrapped In Fashion', an older Lafontaines song that talks about an ex-model with a daughter and an alcohol problem. Whilst not one of my favourite songs, I thought it would go well with the location I would be moving into, as obviously filming at home is a good way of ensuring continuity and of getting permission to use a location.
We did not move to this house, but I was going to continue to use 'Wrapped In Fashion' because I had already developed the idea in my head of how my music video might look. However, I soon realised that there were aspects of the song that seemed quite unprofessional and it was not as fine tuned as some of their other tracks.
Therefore I decided to make my music video for the song 'Light Up The Background' instead. As well as being one of my favourite songs, it is more fast paced and exciting than 'Wrapped In Fashion' and since my thriller opening was a very quiet and slow piece, I thought it would be a good contrast to do a more challenging song that required a different style of editing.
I decided to use The Lafontaines over any other artists because I felt I knew them as artists fairly well and considering that they were unsigned, it seemed a great opportunity to make a music video for my favourite band. What I didn't anticipate was the difficulty in finding similar artists and in identifying their genre.

I understand now that it may have disadvantaged me to have chosen a band is fairly inaccessible to me in the fact I cannot film them as they are not a local band, nor one that is easy to contact. This may be problematic as most new musical artists have performance based videos to help people get to know them as artists - in fact, the Lafontaines other videos feature them quite heavily. In contrast, my music video will be narrative based and telling the story of a boy and how he is struggling against the many negative influences a teenage boy faces in day-to-day life.