Blog Music Project

 In this video, we show the process of my team's music project. Talking a little bit about the production of the music video and the presentation. 

In case the video doesn't work: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l0UULh1QcVIlwe45xwxzFnA2w09JX2ah/view?usp=sharing

Music Marketing

As part of our midterm, we were assigned to create an artist from scratch and design a marketing campaign for them. Previous to this assignment, we researched how some bands under the same spectrum (Rock subgenres) marketed themselves and how they were part of the artists' brand.

For my case study, I researched Gorillaz, a band with a really particular marketing campaign, where they use cross-media convergence to build a narrative world around their fictional members. Gorillaz is a brilliant example of how to engage users through social media. For our artist, we won't be able to apply many of the concepts explored by Gorillaz, as our artist Sylas is a small artist and wouldn't have the funds to raise a huge campaign like Gorillaz, but I would take an element that I really like, which is how innovative their concerts are. Of course, we couldn't make anything like Gorillaz live events, but I researched for an alternative that could work for a small artist, finding an interactive experience between artist and fans. Where fans would have the opportunity to do activities like designing album covers, have a meet and greet, and then listen to live music.

As another part of the assignment, we were assigned to make a music video of already existing songs. We chose "Time is Running Out" by Muse. After choosing the song, we had a base to build our artist. We wanted the artist to match the vibes of the song, so we went for a dark aesthetic, but we gave her an eccentric personality, almost like a misfit, but we made her be proud of it. She is also young and rebellious, searching to connect with younger audiences, as these audiences are the ones that are most exposed to social media. This was what we made during the first days as we were focusing on planning the video, as we were shooting that weekend. Later on, we added details to her background like her coming from Flint, Michigan, which is said to be one of the most depressing places, and made her escape to New York, as she felt she needed more. Also, other details of her life like not having gone to college or a past toxic relationship that would be the reason behind the song "Time is Running Out." She is also really creative, that's why for her music video we aimed for an artistic vision, and the little part that could be referred to as narrative is really metaphorical.

We used these two lines as the base for the music video concept. The song basically talks about fighting against the desire of a toxic relationship, a relationship that is described more like an obsession than anything. Under this premise, and the first line in the picture, we translated this to a person voluntarily drowning. First, with some shots of Sylas looking at a person drowning in a loop on her TV, we would portray the obsession. The video would be mainly blue, but will have some elements of red/orange resembling fire, that will be representing Sylas and how it can be extinguished by water, which, as previously mentioned, would represent this other person in the relationship.

With this really ambiguous storyline, we wanted to leave room for the artistic element, which is light, to shine, but at the same time represent Sylas's strong sense of creativity. But we also had to make it a promo video as it would be her first song and the artist should be exposed in her first video. For the promo videos, we kept the water topic by using a reflector to put a water texture over Emi who was singing as Sylas. These promo shots also have our main artistic element, which is light.

In the following days, we will focus on editing the video and making our brand stronger. By portraying Sylas's personality traits in different social media posts. We would like to use Instagram and TikTok to promote her music as it is free and can reach a lot of people. We would like to use her funny side to reach a lot of people. Something I haven't discussed with the group but I think would be good is making videos like Ricky Montgomery, who is a small artist with a lot of financial problems, so he just makes super cheap videos that, because of being cheap, are funny and highly engaging.

We weren't really effective the first couple of days, but today we made massive progress and we are on a good path.