Music Marketing Project Development

Recently, we were assigned a genre of music to do a music video on for Media Studies, our's being R&B (rhythm and blues). Of the three songs we had to choose from, my group agreed upon a peculiar sample: C'mon Talk by Bernhoft. We had to act as if this was our brand—our character— and market this music video as if it were our first song. Amongst the current circumstances and limitations we faced, we had to get real strange with our ideas: we decided to brand our musician as an omniscient being who is simulating the music video through artificial intelligence.

The first time we heard the song we thought the file was corrupted, to be honest. The song begins with very harsh auto-tune, becoming more and more glitchy as if it were a  broken record until it leads into the main hook. From there on, the song seems to be be relatively normal, however getting pretty repetitive after a while. This gave us the idea that the music video could be a simulation, with the artist attempting to create the perfect music video through artificial intelligence. 

Small details throughout the music video would start to suggest that there is something wrong with what is being shown, eventually stacking up to be incredibly noticeable until the simulation collapses on itself and the music video simulation has to be rebooted after the artist inside the video becomes conscious that he is inside a simulation music video (trippy, I know). We would introduce the idea that he is in a simulation with effects such as data-moshing—a technique of damaging video clips to create a glitch effect wherein frames that should change don't. The level of glitchiness would be in relation to how aware the character inside the video is becoming, eventually becoming engulfed by darkness as the environment disappears. Overall, we want to fill our music video with lots of abstraction and experimental effects like these mentioned to create a surreal experience for the audience which will attract them to our artist's brand.

Examples of data-moshing

As complex and difficult it may seem to accomplish these technical and cinematic feats, our project is actually simple film-making techniques (for the most part) under an artistic disguise. One of our biggest limitations being we can't meet in person, we took it upon ourselves to make our music video both interesting and easy upon ourselves to produce. We would employ standard music video tropes such as singing to the lyrics, filming in different locations and cutting between them, etc. but we would use the power of context and storytelling (alongside actually good cinematography and VFX) to make these scenes more engaging and interactive, ultimately attracting the audience through the story while making it simple upon ourselves to film.

Our mission making this music video is to ultimately show that simple film-making techniques paired with creative storytelling (and some technical feats) can differentiate between a shitty video and a really cool one.