Behind Th Scenes - Light Years - Bottle Rocket (Music Video)

Cleveland, OH based Pop-Punk unit Light Years have weaved their way through the scene for almost a decade. Formed by vocalist Pat Kennedy, he enlisted in Tommy Englert, Andrew Foerst and Kent Sliney to round out the group in 2009. They have notched up tours with heavy-hitters like Neck Deep, State Champs, Modern Baseball, Citizen and Turnover, alongside appearances on The Vans Warped Tour and So What?! Music Festival. Recently, they announced their forthcoming record ‘Afterlife’ is due out November 30th via Rude Records. The 11-track masterpiece was recorded and produced by Will Yip (who also produced the band’s 2015 classic, ‘I’ll See You When I See You’). Following the recent release of their video for Bottlerocket (HERE), frontman Pat is here to give us an insight into its creation...

So we decided to release one of our favorite tracks from the record, full-blown rocker ‘Bottle Rocket’. With the song title, we naturally thought “hey we should make a video with like... fireworks and stuff.” Coincidently our guitarist Andrew actually works for a fireworks company. So we had him grab as much stuff as he was legally allowed from his job and hired our friend Dave Wilson to shoot the video. (Side note he did Light Years very first video “World Burns Out.”) 

Andrews grandparents own a house out in the country area where we would be good and secluded and able make all the noise in the world without the police coming out bother us. So with all our different schedules, we had one day where we could lock this video down, and in typical Light Years style, of course, it was supposed to rain that day. God hates our band. 

So the challenge was to try and set up and get as much footage as we could in between bursts of rain, where we would throw a popup tent over our gear. So for the shots of colored smoke, we would stand off camera and wave it around on stick near the person being filmed. Inhaling that stuff probably shaved some years off all our lives. 

We weren’t able to do a lot of the stuff we had planned because of the rain but got off some cool shots with these things called shower mines, which can be seen in the end. All in all, we are very happy with the video and Dave was able to edit together a cool video even with all the weather issues.