Music Marketing Project Follow-Up

We may not have been the most creative individuals on the planet, but we sure did try to at least show off in front of our classmates. 

Our project started with the main goal of being original (quirky and different, if I may), using unconventional filming techniques and post-production editing to make our music video stand out. However, we realized that by following this dogma we would be faced with unnecessary stress, so we tried to keep things simple in regards to filming and composition and focused on our experimental storytelling. In the end, we decided to veil our lazy camera work through this storytelling and well-done special effects by, yours truly, Luis Rodriguez. I filmed the project within one day with the help of a friend outside of our group, allowing us to focus on our presentation and editing rather than crunching everything last second which we almost ended up doing.

Much of the ideas which influenced our music video came from our case studies and personal preferences. Our song started with these weird, glitchy vocals which we thought reminded us of the "techy," synthwave sound of the song Blinding Lights by the Weeknd (even though they sound nothing alike).  Falling into the R&B genre, we incorporated it into our case studies along with Khalid's Free Spirit, which sounds more similar to our song C'mon Talk by Bernhoft, and through this we were able to gather enough knowledge on the genre to plan our project. Focusing on the "techy" aspect to our song, we created a character/brand surrounding this experimentalist style of music called Neue, who would act as a personification of this R&B. We also made sure to not get carried away by this theme of tech and experimentalism, so in our presentation and music video we tried to constantly reference back to fundamental genre of the song by emulating and mentioning genre characteristics.

Examples of effects we used to match the experimental "vibes" of our music video were pixel sorting and data-moshing. Pixel sorting is an effect which essentially sorts pixels in a certain proximity in order of their color value such as hue, saturation, or brightness. It ends up creating an effect that looks glitchy and artistic. Data-moshing, as discussed in my previous post, is an effect which causes portions of a video to not change how they are supposed to, causing compression and superimposition of motion and video between different clips. This also ends up creating a cool looking glitch effect, which in combination with pixel sorting allowed us to tell our story with greater engagement and therefore reducing the labor of the project upon ourselves by using unconventional but easy film/editing techniques.

After all was said and done, we then worked on our presentation during the course of a 3-4 hour Discord call with my teammates, and to be honest, I was very surprised with how well we all worked together and did our part for the project/presentation. Everyone gave it their all in making our presentation as attractive and engaging as possible, and I believe we succeeded in that. We wrote a 4-page script before our big day to make sure we would not stutter and mess up the presentation (although that didn't work completely as planned), and we revised the aesthetic of our presentation multiple times to match the theme of our virtual band. It was probably one of the few times where a group project seemed to work cohesively and efficiently.

Overall, we were all very satisfied with the quality of our work when we finished, and I hope future media projects will be as cohesive as this one. Although in the beginning I was very stressed out since we had a week left to do our project, we eventually came up with an effective plan to tackle the project, allowing everything come together nicely. We believe our project goes to show that through cohesive teamwork and creative storytelling, you can make a simple concept engaging and original which will garner the attention it deserves.