While January may be coming to the end, I’ve had the opportunity to begin an all new project. And what other way to kick off the year than with a music video. Now I’ve made a few music videos in the past for certain classes, but the experience has always been more or less the same. We pick a song and dive straight into making it. This time though, we’ve had to take a different approach to making a music video.
My class was randomly split and randomly given several songs pertaining to a specific genre. My group was given Sub-Genres of Rock. Not long after we had to come up with a plan for how we were going to not only make a music video, but also a music marketing campaign to accompany the music video. Our goal with the project is to create a compelling brand from scratch that we would use to pitch the campaign to our class.
Before we got any bright ideas, we first did some research about the genre and common marketing strategies. I decided to research AFI (A Fire Inside), a punk rock band from Universal Music Group. They’ve been making music together since the 90s, but in order to use the most reliable information, we decided to stick with their campaigns for their more recent releases such as AFI (The Blood Album) and Bodies. These two releases leaned into the genres of punk rock and gothic rock; their campaigns kept with the themes of these releases.
Both releases had similar roll outs. For the Blood Album, AFI made sure to keep with the color palette of reds, whites, and blacks. They also released promo based music videos of the band and generated attention through social media. For Bodies, it was for the most part the same, they made promo music videos, posted on social media, and kept with a color palette.
List of Promo Music Videos:
With the research to back it up, my group decided that for this brand we were creating, that we were going to make a promo music video and stick with a color palette throughout our campaign. After a few ideas for the name and brand, we landed on The White Roses as our band name. We came to the conclusion that the color palette for the campaign would generally stick with white, with some red accents to help certain visuals feel punchy. For the music video we want to isolate the reds, so that its the only color in a black and white frame.
To prepare for filming this Sunday, we spent some time storyboarding several shots that we thought would look cool. Since this is a promo music video, we want the shots to look visually interesting and we intend to get A LOT of footage so that when editing comes we have plenty of shots to choose from. Another important aspect for the video was a good location; we spent some time in class thinking of where would be a good place to film. In the end we had a list of about 5 potential places that we could film, and to help in choosing one, a member of the group went location scouting.
And that finally brings us to now, Friday night. We’ve had a bit of trouble getting to this point, but I’m optimistic about Sunday. I’m definitely going to do what I can so by the end we had an effective music video that we can use for our marketing campaign
