Music Video: Chosen Artist

This song was written when I was 13 years old. It is about finding the strength to not be affected by the media and magazines that portray "beauty" as something unattainable. This is an anthem-like song to help others find and embrace their own beauty. I rerecorded it for my latest record Heartwood because to me, this is an important song. Who gets to decide beauty anyway? We are all so different and the differences are where beauty lies.

                                                                               - Amanda Rogers on writing This Beauty
             

Artist: Amanda Rogers 

Genre: Piano/Pop/Indie

Song: This Beauty

Album: Heartwood 

Amanda discovered her passion for music in her teens, chanelling the turbulent emotions through her lyrics and what has been described as "aleatoric music". 

Aleatoric Music - Music in which some element of the composition is left to chance (Wikipeidia) 

Her style is anything but unoriginal combining soft piano with pop, indie, jazz and blues influences. The previous recordings are very much rougher sounding acoustics and her musical arrangement has developed and been explored with time. Having made eight albums in total, a change of image is unavoidable and the refinement of recent albums is evident when compared to earlier recordings. The album from which we'll be using the song is one of the most recent, leaning more towards the refined end of the spectrum. The development of her self-image is evident not only through the music but also in web design, professional photos, the development of a clothing line and graphic design. I would say Amanda Rogers's image has simply been enhanced, rather than gone through a drastic image change.


Representation
                                           
Whilst coming up with ideas for our music ideas, we thought quite a lot about how exactly we would be representing Amanda visually and what was key to include, as well as what wasn't part of her self-image. Through exploring her website, we concluded that featuring a natural location somewhere was absolutely KEY as her role in sustaining and caring for the environment is quite a large part of her self image. Most of her photos feature in woods, or in some sort of natural location, and she is known to be quite the tree fanatic. This love of nature ties in with her signifying natural beauty. Her fashion sense and general visual self-representation doesn't involve much artificial make-up and trendy clothing. She seems to wear almost hippy-like clothing and colours, however in a fashionable way. Headbands seem to be a recurring accessory in most of her photos. Whatever photos there are of Amanda in natural locations, the rest seem to mostly contain her performing her songs live. We aim to incorporate a similar (as possible) costume in our video as well as a significant amount of trees and other natural locations. Similarly, natural (looking) lighting is what we intend to use for our location as opposed to some of the harsh and dramatic lighting pop music videos tend to use. 


In the process of planning our shoot we drew inspiration from some of the photos posted on Amanda's website and even considered replicating a couple photos taken for the album "Heartwood".

We thought the best way to contact our artist was directly via e-mail from the contact information given on the website. Seeing as she manages her own music, we assumed she would hold most of the copyrights for the requested track. Below is an image of our e-mail to Amanda and the reply.