Choosing the artist...

Before thinking about ideas of the visual aspect of the music video, of course; you have to have music. Choosing the music is primarily the most important thing to get right as without music that inspires the senses, how are you to fashion ideas and visualise them as a video? So before i even thought about performance value and ideas for the video, i chose my song. To narrow the choice down i though about bands that personally inspire my own music, and bands that music makes me feel alive. The shortlist of bands that i thought of creating a video for were:

• Coheed & Cambria (songs such as 'Welcome Home' and 'Feathers')


• Red Hot Chili Peppers (songs such as 'Zephyr Song' and 'Scar Tissue'


• Breaking Benjamin (songs such as 'Breath' and 'Evil Angel')


• Fightstar (songs such as 'Paint Your Target' and Paliniuks Laughter')


• Linkin Park (songs such as 'Shadow of the Day' and 'Faint')


• Muse (songs such as 'Hysteria' and 'United States of Eurasia')


• Pendulum (songs such as 'Hold Your Colour' and 'Granite')


• System of a Down (songs such as 'Lost in Hollywood' and 'Question!')

After looking through and listening to various songs made by each group, i narrowed down my search and began to look through the videos that the bands had already produced professionally. After painstakingly searching for videos of the bands that inspired my most i felt that System of a Down were the most interesting to produce a music video before. They have such a varied amount of video styles, from the surreal to the sublime; and it was this that made me want to create a video for them. System have always been one of my favourite bands and i am a huge fan of front man Serj Tankian, who's political rants on stage matched with his fearless representation of today's society through his lyrics; make him a real focal point of the band and an inspiration for many. After i was sure that i was to make a video of one of System of a Down's songs i searched through their back catalogue of songs, from the first album to the last, attempting to find a song that most encapsulated their tyrannical brilliance. The song that really stood out to me (and did when i first heard it) was 'Question!'. The reason for this was that it was such a fantastic mix of technical acoustic guitar and epically heavy riffs, that's pace changed constantly; keeping the song alive and fresh throughout. These reasons, atop the fact i adore the song, helped me reach my decision over which song to use for my music video.