Music Video Marketing Blog #1

For the past few weeks, me and my team have been working on our Music Video Research and Marketing project! Here, I am going to run down our process and experiences as we have worked on planning, research, and brainstorming. 

Planning 

Screenshot of our Rough Idea Document

We first got to work on planning by hearing the collection of songs we were assigned. Our group got the R&B music playlist, and out of the 4 songs we listened to, we thought that one stood out like a sore thumb for its immersing glitchiness and catchy beats, something that we would use to our advantage in the brainstorming parts later on. We continued by planning out who would be in charge of what. We knew that there was a lot to this project, from marketing to video production, so we wanted to divide work evenly so that it could be completed in a reasonable amount of time. We made sure to give everyone a job that would fit their strengths, but also to take some parts of the project and dissect them together so that we would all be in the loop. We created a google doc to keep track of our ideas and then we moved onto researching different bands and artists.

Research

Frame From the Weeknd's "Blinding Lights"

The research process went very smoothly, being able to finish our assigned "research chart" and figuring out what we like and disliked from the genre and its music video culture. We finished it in the span of a day and from it, we figured out the ins and outs of the genre, its artists, and the way that they market themselves. One key realization we came to was that most contemporary artists use social media platforms and their online presence as their number one way of marketing. Perhaps the best thing we found in the Research process was The Weeknd's "Blinding lights" Music Video. It contained everything that we sought after, engaging composition and camera movement, stunning lighting and color, and sharp edits that were just on the beat. We would go on to use this Music Video as a great piece of inspiration into what an effective, groovy, and yet modern music video looked liked for the R&B genre. With research wrapped up, it was time to Brainstorm.

Brainstorming

Test Render Made by me to plan out the ending shot.

Lastly, and perhaps most exciting, brainstorming. From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to make this Music Video related to technology in some way. We thought that the beginning of the Song sounded like if something was rebooting or glitching back into place, so we thought it would be cool if we took some of those themes and attached them to our music video. Making something 4th wall breaking seemed like a really fun idea, so the story was to follow an artist in some form of cheesy music video, however with a dark twist. The artist is actually just a simulation being run by somebody to create a music video, the specific reason as to why is never stated. This Idea would open Pandora's box of creative opportunities that we planned to take advantage of.

We would make the beginning of the video a rewind playback of the entire video, matching perfectly with the stuttery sound of the start of the piece. Throughout the video, the character would start off normally, but as the world around them becomes different and distorted, they notice that the camera has been following them all along, so they try to catch it but fail to as it teleports to another shot location. Towards the end, we would have a 3d render of the person pulling the strings of the simulation. Perhaps one of our favorite ideas was the use of data moshing, a technique that makes it look as though the pixels of a previous shot transfer to the movement of the next, which we could use to signify that the simulation is falling apart. All of these would come together into a single coherent concept of a person who realizes they are in a simulation and try to break out of it, eventually failing and being sent on the same cycle of despair yet again.