Music Marketing Recap
After a short 3 weeks of working on this project, there are many thoughts I have about the planning and execution of our marketting campaign. The planning was rough, which is likely why we ran into a few problems during the execution. All in all, I feel we were able to pull through and make the best the situation.
As my last blog post mentioned, planning didn’t exactly go so smoothly. The story board for the music video was finished the night before filming and the filming schedule was created the morning of. The idea was: A disoriented drug addict bounces in and out of their high, unaware that the behavior is affecting the relationship with their now sober partner. To my surprise, filming went pretty smoothly.
Once everyone had arrived at the designated meeting place (my house) we began our journey to the first filming location (there’s 2). We scouted out the wilderness (Markham park) for a good spot to set up. My own habit for perfection made it difficult to decide on this location, but we eventually settled for a spot near the sports arena (disk golf course). I tried to make sure we followed the map (storyboard) as closely as possible to avoid getting lost (needing reshoots). We were working on people's time so it was important we tried to finish the filming proces as soon and as efficiently as possible. All of the outdoor scenes were supposed to represent different stages of the character's addiction as their drug addiction slowly begins to eat away at them, as well as the characters high slowly becoming an unsafe and unwelcome place.
After we finished our treck through the woods (filming at Markham Park), we continued our journey to the second (and final) filming location (my house). It was the ninth hour (about 3:00pm) of our day and one of our actors was in dire need of heading to his abode before sundown (He needed to be home by 5:30pm). So we decided to prioritze his footage first. While we filmed him lip-sync to the tune, another group member went to the market to trade (buy props at Publix).
These shots were meant to serve as the Promo portion of the music video, showcasing who the artist is. We used colored lighting for the whole of the indoor shoot in order to present 3 different ideas: The addiction or the controlling force of conflict, the intervention or the force trying to gain control of the addiction, and the middle ground or the act of seeking help and listening to avoiding the need for said intervention. Their colors would be red, blue, and green, respectively. The singer, would be tied between them all, drawing from his experience with addiction and recovery.
Eventually our fellow ally (group member) returned from her journey (Publix) and bestowing upon us necessities and luxeries (props and popcorn chicken). We feasted and bid farewell to our fallen soldier (one of our actors had to go home). We resumed on the task at hand, getting all of the shots we needed with out other actor who was also being summoned away (his parents wanted him home). These series of shots involved a push and pull between the drug addict and the person staging an intervention. The drug addict would mainly be coated in red light while the partner was covered in blue light. There as a green light covering both of them, symbolizing the middle ground of the situation.
With red being a color associated with violence, we gave the drug addict explosive tendancies and a short temper. We also felt this would help represent what a drug addiction, specifically the withdrawals, can feel like and how they affect ones behavior. The blue light, which is sometimes associated with both intelligence and sadness, was used to also demonstrate their partners state, which was feeling powerless in a situation where they know a person needs help. Green, which is often a color associated with nature and rejuvination was utilized to symbolize the middle ground between the extremes and the potentially healthier future it could result in. The colored lighting was also utilized to create a feeling of overstimulation, making the environment the drug addict is in during withdrawals feel less welcoming, which would give them the motive to keep using.
Filming was just about to wrap up. We had lost another man (our other actor needed to go home) and once we crossed out the last square on the map (storyboard) we rejoiced!
Now at this moment we'd all felt it was going swell. My fellow ally(group member) would take home the scraps of our creation (the footage) to begin piecing it together (editing). Then they handed the project file to me. I, being the perfectionist that I am, began my portion of the edit, making my life more difficult with my painstaking meticulousness. But allas, perfection is an impossibility, and there were more than enough mistakes to have made me wish we had had more time.
There were a couple of worries on my mind during this process. Number 1: do we have enough footage to fill the 4 minutes? (we didn't). Number 2: Are we representing our characters well? (thats debatable). Number 3: Is this going to make any sense to anyone? (hopefully). As I edited I realized the story we filmed was not exactly the story we planned, and seeing it all put together made me realize that the extra time in pre-production may have been necessary. I also may have been a bit over my head with trying to portray the more complicated concept.
I finally finished the edit, and my group had already started piecing together the presentation. With the outline we had created for our campaign, we developed it in further detail with the presentation. In hindsight, we probably could've avoided the wordiness of our slides. We also probably could've done a little more planning for the nitty gritty bits of our campaign, like how the artist would maintain his campaign after the single is released. While I've always understood the importance of planning, I feel this project has helped me realize just how much of it is necessary to create a good product. If I had worked on fully fleshing out the story before diving into the story board, it would've made our video a bit more cohesive and easy to understand. If we had dedicated more time to researching our campaign we would've had a more structured outlook on not just the plan, but the presentation. I'm not bad at planning, I'm just figuring out how to do it still. I plan to take this knowledge with me when we start the film opening.
No comments:
Post a Comment