Music Marketing Blog Post #2

 The music marketing project is one that I was pretty excited for. I love music and I love music videos, and a music video is a major component of the project. The other major component is creating a marketing plan for a fictious band that is meant to be promoted through the video. The project began when our group got randomly assigned got a genre to work with, ours being heavy rock. This excited me because it's a genre that I really enjoy. We then received the songs we would have to choose from when it came to what song to use for the video. Although it wasn't my first choice, the song we choose was Duality by Slipknot. It wasn't my favorite out of the available songs, but looking back it was probably the best choice. It has a rhythm which is really good for fast paced editing, which is good for music videos. 

 The next step was research. Our group had to create a document of research for two record companies and two bands/artists signed to each, these bands having to fall under the genre we were basing our project on. The subjects of our research also had to have released new music in the last five years. We started on deciding on two artists first, then picking two more based on their record labels. The first band we choose was Korn, because they've been a major influence in the metal scene since their inception. I also decided that we should also use Rob Zombie, mainly because I'm a big fan of his work, and also because heavy rock tends to be dominated by bands, so I wanted to mix in a solo artist. We divided the research among ourselves and got to work, mainly focusing on our subjects' use of marketing tactics, especially the incorporation of social media and the internet.

 Once the research was done, it was time to plan the presentation and video. To do that we had to decide who our artist would be. Early on we decided that it would be one singular person as opposed to a full band. This would make it easier on us, as we only had to promote one individual and only needed one person to play said individual in the video and in photos (that person being me). Given that this was a new artist we would be promoting, we decided that our target audience should be young adults and that social media would be very important to our marketing. We then came up with the idea of our artist being someone playing a character. We talked about how there wouldn't be a consistent band playing at every show, which led one of our group members to parallel that to the idea of a spider that regenerates its limbs. This led us to our character concept: an alien spider that uses the power of music to assimilate people into its colony in a sort of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scenario. We started planning our video around showcasing this concept, with a group of teenagers coming across the alien entity. In a word document, we planned out the plot and began to highlight and annotate the lyrics. Things were going good, until I really started to think about what our plan was. It was clear to me that we were trying to bite off more than we could chew when it came to our video's concept, and we had to scale back. The rest of the group agreed. The video's plot changed to being themed around alien abduction and experimentation with a more vague and implied plot, and our artist (who still lacked a name) would be simply preform as themself, although the alien bug motif remained. I made a storyboard based on our new direction, and soon enough it was time to film and create our marketing presentation. 

A page from our planning. Many of these ideas were kept while others were discarded.

 Originally, I planned on filming the entire video at my house. I even designed to the storyboard to allow for this, due to the fact that I didn't know what the availability of my group would be. Thankfully, I realized that we had the time to film in my school's TV production studio, so that's where we began to shoot footage. The TV studio provided a great set, as it was nearly pitch black with the lights off, so all it talk was a phone flash light and some clever angles to get some pretty cool shadow effects. It also had the somewhat industrial look that I wanted. I volunteered to be the one being filmed, making me take on the role of the artist. We had a clay model spider, courtesy of one of our group member's craftsmanship, that could be pulled along a wire web, and got a few angles on that to use in the video. We used the storyboard as our guideline to filming, but it was more of a vague suggestion than an exact instruction manual. A lot of things were done differently, and some things were just done on the fly. Overall, it went very well, but by the time class ended and we couldn't film anymore, there was still work to be done. 

 The following weekend, I filmed the remainder of the needed footage at my house while also editing everything all together. This was so we would all have time to work on the presentation together when the week began. Filming and editing at my house went well, all though it was definitely half-hazard. After filming some storyboarded shots that I new were needed, I began to put everything on the editing timeline, attempting to cut shots to the beat of the music the best I could. I soon realized that I still needed more footage, so I quickly grabbed a flashlight, set up my tripod, turned off the lights, and crawled underneath my desk to lip sync in the dark with the light illuminating my shots. I actually ended with some of my favorite visuals from this, moving my face towards and away from the light to get some dynamic shadows. I also got a shot where it looked like my eyes had gone fully black my face looked somewhat grayscale, making me look an alien. There was no editing involved with that, just lighting. 

 After editing was over, it was time to finish the marketing presentation, which we really split the workload one. We started by finally coming up with a name for our artist, Fang Threat. We then came up with a timeline for what our marketing would be, including shows at small venues at social media posts. Those social media posts went to me, as I had to film myself as Fang Threat promoting his music. I also created an "About" page for the Fang Threat website that one of the other group members made. This page told the story of who Fang Threat is, who I decided would be a young man named Alex Andrews, a musical prodigy, lover of journaling and doodling, and horror and sci-fi geek. I felt like these qualities placed him firmly within the common traits you would expect of a metal artist, as well as a modern indie artist. After that, all I needed was to record the audio for my slides of the presentation.

 Overall, I think this project came out very well, especially in regards to the video. It certainly helped to plan using the storyboard and to have the group members there to help out in the process. Next time I definitely want to be better with time management, so I don't have to film and edit at the same time again. I think that when it comes to my portfolio project, I'll really need to plan well and make sure my idea is something that's actually filmable with my available time and resources, so I won't need to make significant changes to it.