Jan 28, 2023
Today, after many outfit changes and sweat, my assigned group and I finally finished filming our music marketing project. For this project, each different group in our class got assigned a music genre. My group got assigned “alternative/indie music”. We all celebrated as this was the perfect genre for our group, we all listened to this genre and knew a lot of bands we could talk about and include in our project.
The “music research chart” was the first part of our journey, we had to research a music company and an album released by an “alternative band” in the past five years. We investigated; Domino Recording Company, RCA Records, Arctic Monkeys, Owen Pallet, The Strokes, and Steve Lacy. We learned that most bands start off gaining a following on social media, performing in small venues, or opening for big artists. They’re on all social media platforms to interact with their fan base and eventually go on tours, they also have merch for each of their albums available for the public to buy. This part of the project was easy, it only required good research skills, a google search bar, and time. It wasn’t until the next steps that things started to get complicated.
Next, we had the marketing campaign and music video to complete. After finishing the research chart, we had to complete a storyboard to move on to our next tasks. This was not a problem since you only had to draw out how you wanted to film your music video, only…. we had no idea what we wanted to film. The only thing we knew we wanted for sure was an 80’s theme. Our song, “The Man” by the killers gave very much 80’s vibes and we settled on that. In the beginning, we were heading in the direction of a video featuring an empowered feminist woman calling herself “The Man”, then we conspired about doing a combination of multiple decades as the singer/ main character jumped in between the different years. That was what we thought would be our final agreement, but after realizing it would take too many props, costumes and didn’t really align with the lyrics we decided to turn to something else.
Our business partner, Ace, had the wonderful idea of making our music video about a narcissistic man, obsessed with himself, feeling on top of the world singing to himself he’s “The Man”. From there, everything ran as smoothly as butter. That led to our very much-needed marketing plan.
Given the “narcissism,” we wanted this song to represent we decided to make this about vain which drove us to name our band “The seven sevens” based on the seven deadly sins.
We created the storyboard and started our marketing campaign, we didn’t have much time left so we knew we wanted to start filming right away to have enough time for editing. We delegated the work and organized everyone’s different tasks. I knew I wanted to focus on the production of the music video, as Gaby wanted to work on the marketing, Ace on the storyboard, and Ale on costume design and logos.
I dedicated myself to watching popular 80’s videos on YouTube and observing shot techniques as well as different angles and editing. I also got inspiration from “That 70’s show” for some scenes as well as the “Take On Me” music video. So far, we have started our filming journey with the storyline of Ace representing “The Man” dressed in an old oversized suit as we (Ale, Gaby, and I) are his band. We did everything we could to make this video happen; we took an entire band set up to the back of regional park (drums included) and played in neon blazers in the melting sun, hung by the window of a moving minivan to get shots of Gaby and Ale running, asked neighbors to use their cool antique cars in the driveway, and even learned the iconic “Breakfast club” dance for some choreography.
This has been one of the most exhausting filming experiences I’ve had but also the most enjoyable. I got to create such great friendships with my group as well as some hilarious memories. I can’t wait to show our final results to my class.
I’ll leave some of our planning processes down below!
