Music Marketing #2

 For your second blog post about the Music Marketing Project you will describe and reflect upon the full process involved with this project.  You should be sure to describe and discuss research, brainstorming/planning, production, post-production, and presentation.  

Your final paragraph should include a reflection of the project as a whole.  What did you learn?  What aspects of this project will be helpful when developing your Cambridge portfolio?

This blog post discuss, in depth, your entire project.  Therefore, it will be a longer posting.  Be sure to include examples from your project.  

Here, submit the URL of your blog.  

For my group's music marketing project, we put a lot of time and effort not only into making the music video itself, but researching about the history of alternative music, and the famous bands and record labels that fill up that space. In order to find out information about how they advertise, and what they do to get their name out there, we had to go to the source itself. These types of bands often have websites for themselves, in order for people to be able to find out more about them. This is where we were able to take a bulk of our information about the respective bands from. Once we found out the information, we had to sort through, and make sure we wrote and talked about the most important parts of their brands. Once that part was done, it was on to brainstorming ideas about our music video.

Although I am extremely proud of how our video turned out, I must confess that the road to get there was not very easy. When we first started throwing around ideas, I remember that many of our members disagreed on how this video should be done. Some thought the video should have a large element of humor, while other members thought that the video should be a little bit more serious. It took us several hours on a Saturday afternoon to finally be able to come to an agreement. We did so by thinking of the bands we based ours on, and how they have done things in the past. Once we thought of that, we all started to get more in sync. Now, even though we had a video idea, shooting it was a completely different beast all together.

For this music video, we only had one day to shoot it. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, and the group members hectic schedule, it was either this one day to film, or no film at all. It was nerve racking, and there were times that I was not sure that we would even be able to finish it. This is especially because so many things could have gone wrong. For one, we ordered props online, and we were afraid that they would not come in time. In the end though, they ended up coming the day of the shoot. We also had to go location scouting in order to find the best places to shoot, and that takes a while, so we were cutting into our precious hours of daylight that we needed to film. Now luckily, we managed to get it all done. Although, production doesn't just refer to the filming itself. It refers to the things around our band. Our very talented group member Isabella offered to build our band their very own website. So, she had to make sure the site not only looked professional but something that could be made for a popular band, and that people would visit. 

Post production was arguably one of the hardest parts of our project. After the filming finished, it was a sigh of relief, but the work wasn't done yet. My group sat for several hours, and talked about how we should approach the editing process of this. Should we use lights to give the video an extra color pop? Should we try to incorporate sound effects? Is it possible for us to edit it perfectly to the beat or will the video be a little off? All those were real questions we asked each other during this process. For one, if your video doesn't sync up to the music, then you have screwed yourselves over completely. If the video is too dark, but your video is lighthearted, then that is also a conflicting area. We had to make sure all the small problems that we had got fixed, and after a couple hours of playing around with our editing tools, we finally figured out the plan. So, the editing process started, and when it was finally finished, it was time to present everything to our peers.

For the presentation, there were a couple of factors to consider. We wanted to make sure that we were upbeat, and were able to have a good flow for the presentation. Our main goal was to avoid awkward silences and dull moments, because that takes away from not only the presentation, but the overall project. We also wanted to make sure that the actual presentation slides that we were working with were organized well. We structured it from talking about our band first, to what we will use to market them, to then showing the video. I think this was a smart move, as we want people to get to know who we are first, rather than us just show them a music video and explain afterwards. I think because we took these steps, we were able to be a lot more successful.

Overall, I would consider this project to be successful. I was glad to not only see my work hard on the project pay off, but I managed to learn a couple of things as well. For one, I was never much of an editor, but I actually learned a lot on this project about the different techniques that people use to edit something of this caliber. I also learned about a lot of the tricks of the camera, due to me being behind it a lot of the time. I think in terms of when I start my Cambridge portfolio, the fact that I now know different tips and tricks for editing and filming will help immensely. It is going to make my future a lot simpler, now that I know what exactly is expected of me, and the fact that I now have the tools to fulfill those expectations.

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