How far would you go to demonstrate your obsessive levels of fandom to your favourite band?
We’re not talking about your run of the mill ‘queueing for hours for front row tickets’ levels of dedication, and we wouldn’t go as far as crazy stalker-dom or spending $100,000 on a limited edition box set, like this crazed (and possibly no longer wealthy) Residents diehard?
But what about an even greater time investment, oh say, dedicating the better part of your teenager years to one band? Or even more impressively, just one song?
That’s exactly what British youth Matt Perren did, giving up three years of his teenagehood to Queen with an awesomely conceived and constructed video project that catapults him into ‘most dedicated music fan’ status after he started his idea three years ago.
Taking the basic concept behind the popular YouTube ‘photo-a-day’ timelapse shots and going one better, Perren captured an image of himself singing along to Queen’s 1979 hit ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ nearly every day for three years, as Slate reports.
Carefully recreating each shot (and wearing what looks to be the same plain black tee for most of the 1,095 day shoot), Perren then compiled together the three years’ worth of footage into a single montage that sees the teen growing before your very eyes as he lip-syncs along to the classic rock single.
The clip begins when the Queen fanatic is 15.2 years old on January 1st 2011 and wraps up on December 29th 2013, at 18.1 years of age. The whole clip then takes a timetrip backwards, with Perren mouthing along to Freddie Mercury’s lyrics of sex machines and atom bombs ready to explode all the while.
The time-lapse effect has been seen in plenty of music videos before (The Paper Kites’ stop-motion viral clip for ‘Young’ springs to mind) but whether you think it’s a cute flight of fancy or a serious waste of time, you’ve gotta hand it to the British teenager, any 15 year old boy that thinks of a project and sticks it out for three years demands respect.
