SHOOTTHEPLAYER: KAKI KING, BEN LEE, FIRST AID KIT

Washed over with ludicrously overdone music videos of teenagers and adults singing covers of mainstream music, YouTube has only a few worthy and mentionable channels. One of them is ShootThePlayer.  This channel is an extension of the official blog with the same title, ShootThePlayer.com/blog.  Filmmakers, Amelia Tovey and Jonathon Wald, shoot singers and indie groups that may be well known or arising in the alternative community. With over 100 music films, the talented filmmakers capture the performers in iconic and sometimes commonplace locations around the world. Their interaction with their environments gives these films originality that cannot be mimicked.

Such awe-inspiring players include Swedish duo First Aid Kit, American singer/songwriter Kaki King, Australian musician/actor Ben Lee to alternative rock artists like Cloud Control, Andrew Bird, Soko, An Horse, and Holly Miranda. There is an abundant amount of talented artists in these films, many who have made it big in the music industry, creating scores for film and television productions to receiving Golden Globe and Grammy nominations/awards, yet they are still unknown to the mainstream audience. The blog also contains many other artists who are not well known to the music community, and are thus given a boost by these films.

Note that the films themselves are not meant to spur artists’ popularity, but rather capture art in the form of live and spontaneous music performances in raw locations. Filming in sites from Sydney Australia at the Opera house to the backdrops of a cemetery in France, the filmmakers capture the artists’ true sounds that are usually hidden in auto-tuned and mechanized mainstream music. All the while, the people and/or environment in the films induce an intimacy and vitality in the performances. 

Kaki King

Below is one of my favorite artists, Kaki King. Amelia filmed her in Australia's Sydney Hyde Park in 2007. Talented at playing lap steel guitar, drums, piano, and the guitar, she plays her custom designed Ovation guitar in the park as pedestrians walk by. Her techniques involving finger-style playing, fret-tapping, and bass-slapping styles exceeds the horizons of artistic guitar playing.