Task 1: Charmaine by Plan B

Benjemin Paul Ballance-Drew is an English rapper, singer song-writer, better known as Plan B from Forest Gate in London. His first album, Who needs actions when you got words gave him wide spread critical acclaim and is the album that the single, 'Charmaine' was released with.  His image is quite organic, which is unusual for a Hip-Hop artist. However, it makes a nice change as we can see a down to earth person in something that can be quite an aggresive genre and culture. This can be seen in his album cover to the left and in his cover for The Defamation of Strickland Banks.

The Defamation of Stickland Banks

There is no existing music video for this track, which is one of the reasons that I am interested in using it. The song talks about a white 19 year old man meeting a young, mixed raced girl, getting her number and then taking her on a date..and so on.

Guildford train station

Gomshall train station

My idea is to create a narrative video that followed the lyrics. For example, the beginning of the video would follow the lyrics, The first day I saw her was at the train station, She was half black, half Caucasian. 

To do this we would shoot it at a train station, for obvious reasons. For this we could use either Guildford or the quieter Gomshall. The action in the video would be very low key, with man shots of a male character hanging out with a female character. As the song develops I would like to use camera shots to show the girls beauty as the lyrics describe her. For example, 'The best of both worlds, caramel complextion' and 'piercing green eyes, they shine like emeralds'. The lyrics progress to say, 'Train pulls up and we get on it together', therefore our timing would have to be precise if we were to fit the entire shoot into a day. Throughout this we would switch back to someone performing in the studio, with the two young lovers conversing in the background out of focus. When it comes to the chorus, I think that the studio would be best. 

Plan B or Ben Drew is signed with six Record labels that are, Warner Brothers Records, Atlantic Records, 679 Artists, Mercury Records, Asylum Records and Cordless Recordings. These record labels vary from independent labels to huge labels part of media conglomerates such as Warner Brothers Records, who are part of the Time Warner conglomerate. The reason that he has so many is because each company can sell his work in many different ways, for example, worldwide, local and sometimes to people outside of his demographic.

Plan B also has numerous fan made sites, however unlike many artist's, these fan sites aren't advertised on his official webpage. However, a simple google search can take you to many of them. I have looked at just three, and I can very quickly spot variations in them. For example, one is a very simple site that isn't very obviously a Plan B fansite, however another one created on FanPop is more detailed and can give fans much more information about the hip-hop/indie artist.

More detailed Fansit

Simple, and not particularly informative fan site

In terms of his social media channels, he has Twitter, Facebook and Souncloud accounts. All of which promote his music, but Twitter in particular allows his fans to see the 'real' Plan B, which, in reality, is likely to be a synthetic image helped to be put together by his marketing team. Nevertheless, it enables his fans to believe that they know what he likes to do with his time, what he finds amusing and so on, which creates a connection between artist and consumer.

Link to Facebook page

Plan B Twitter

Plan B Soundcloud