Rising to the Occassion: Music Marketing Blog #1

It's our second long-term project of the year and creating a marketing campaign from scratch is a challenging endeavor, to say the least. I immediately knew I would work with Matthew, Samy, Mya, and Miguel and I was truly excited to work with them all to see how we all function together collectively. We sent Miguel to get our music genre and we were all equally confused about the genre we were supposed to do at first. The songs all seemed to have a very different tone to them, but it just seemed like all of them were meant to be within different genres. We listened through each song together to see which one we "vibed" with the most and we chose Tonight by Phoenix, featuring Ezra Koenig. I had actually listened to the band Phoneix before, so it felt relieving to see one artist I knew on the One Drive with the song choices. Our group loved the playful, upbeat, but melancholy message of the song and we thought it'd be something we could make a story out of. 

However, our music video wouldn't be a storytelling one. Considering we're all part of CBTV, we were always required to do a storytelling music video at the end of the year, so we wanted to let go of the hardwired routine we fell into for music videos and wanted to be more experimental with an artistic music video. With that decision came brainstorming a concept we wanted to convey, and we wanted to stick to the loneliness theme throughout the song. In terms of a tone for our music video, we wanted to make it funky and weird because the melody of this song feels like it's embracing both of those things. We were all spitballing our ideas during class, but none of us were able to come to a consensus about how we'd convey the loneliness concept, which made pre-production much harder for us. Samy and I kept going back and forth about the logistics of the vision she had, and some people in our group weren't particularly fond of it. I wanted our video to feel lonely with an illusion of a vibrant atmosphere, but we kept going back to minute details. Eventually, we all decided to put the concept for the music video on the back burner and work on a schedule to follow instead, going through the details first and then thinking about the bigger picture or message for our video. 

After agreeing on a schedule to follow in class, we took baby steps to work towards solidifying our artistic approach: thinking of locations, props, equipment, and going through things we wanted to happen in the video, in other words, an action list.

After an intense and confusing discussion about our concept, we decided to follow through with Samy’s vision and let her walk us through the kind of music video she wanted. It all started to visually make sense with our storyboard: lots of graphic matches, costume changes, location changes, and a wide range of color palettes that would convey different things, sprinkling things we all wanted into the video. I feel like that was the most difficult obstacle we had to overcome — finding a middle ground when thinking of how we wanted to convey our concepts. I was pleasantly surprised at how well we were able to incorporate all of our ideas into our storyboard, and we were finally ready to start filming. So, we wanted to dive head first into the production stage and made Wednesday our first filming day. 

A sneak peek

My favorite stage so far has been the depth of our brainstorming  during pre-production. I’ve never gotten a chance to do long-term projects like these, so being able to spend more time on the planning element always works out for the better during production. Next time you’ll hear from me, our final product will come to flourish. Hasta luego!