Critical Reflection

When creating Friday Tiki Club’s (FTC) latest music video for Sunshine, our main goal was to create a fun and laidback piece which invokes feelings associated with nostalgia and youthfulness. Through an informal approach to production, FTC’s latest piece doesn’t take itself too seriously and reminds its audience that it’s important to have a good time and to take it easy, a concept which is central to the band’s brand identity.

Being a high school band, it is not surprising that FTC’s music consists of adolescent issues and topics, especially in their song Sunshine. In the song, the lyrics revolve around the singer missing his ex-partner, his “Sunshine,” and how he has to now cope with them being in a new relationship. Predominantly, the viewers of this piece would be high schoolers aged 14-18, although the song could be relatable to older audiences in college or in their 20s. Like most songs in the indie rock genre, the song has an upbeat, energetic quality to it which is sought by this younger audience and therefore this is reflected in the content of the music video itself through “candid” clips of the band having fun in between main performance clips, and in a more general sense, randomness, creating the sense of levity and escapism the target audience seeks. Overall, however, the music video doesn’t take itself seriously, which is I believe is key to accomplishing this effect.

When initially planning the production of the piece, creating this sense of “amateurism” and levity was a concept deemed highly important to the band and their established identity. So when discussing the required components of the project, the part which created the most conflict was the social media marketing. To them, they feared the idea of being “highly commercialized” through this medium, so due to this, we had trouble establishing a posting pattern for their social media page. Since they are known for making infrequent posts, a sudden change in this posting pattern would seem unlike the band’s established identity, so we initially compromised on posting once a week. This fell through after the second week, however, therefore I decided to finally create a dummy account for the page to promote the music video, @sunshine.ftc on Instagram. 

To preserve the band’s laidback brand, most of the posts are in the form of memes or have short captions to create this sense of “amateurism,” although the sacrifice in doing this was consistency and a lack of posts. If I could improve any aspect of this project, it most likely would be this component which I should've planned more thoroughly from the beginning. The band, however, likes the social media page, which I suppose is more important in a sense since I am working to satisfy a client (the band) in the scope of the project’s music video production prompt.

Outside the context of the Cambridge’s project requirements, however, I would argue that the project successfully engages its audience in a variety of ways despite its weaknesses. As mentioned, the energy and excitement created by music video is a convention of indie rock, arousing an overall positive feeling sought by the audience. Among other conventions, though, is the appeal to nostalgia culture which is accomplished by recording the entirety of the piece on a VHS camera. With the rise of modern media romanticizing the late 20th century and early 2000s, newer generations have garnered a new appreciation for things retro and “indie”—“The good old days!”— leading to a large consumption of media influenced by this timeframe. VHS, which was popular in the latter half of the 1990s and early 2000s, happens to be in the center of this nostalgia culture—the romanization for this form of media so popular nowadays that various VHS-effect filters have been created to emulate the effect of using a VHS (albeit, not very good)—so what better way, I thought, at appealing to this culture than using a real VHS camera to film my piece? 

Other than various case studies of VHS being used in indie rock music videos such as Tame Impala’s Is it True, Beach Fossils’ Down the Line, and Eyedress's Jealous, past experience from using the camera supported the notion that it would be a good choice for the Sunshine music video. In my previous project, Skateboards and Monsters, the piece was also influenced by nostalgia culture and was recorded on VHS, too, an aspect which was widely celebrated by the audience when it was finally released. Due to this, I also thought it would be perfect to use in this project since the target audience for both pieces are nearly identical: teenagers who listen to indie rock.

For the digipak, I decided to go for vinyl which is a common collectible for fans of nostalgia culture and music lovers alike. The design on the vinyl has two sides, the front being a darkened picture of Seb recording his guitar solo for Sunshine—representing their serious side and dedication—and the back, a picture of Jake making a funny face—representing their fun and laidback side. The minimalist placement of "friday tiki club" and "sunshine" at the corners of the cover design also further emphasizes their dedication to their music by drawing attention to the image of Seb himself, and on the back, the barcode serves as a mockup of what the vinyl would look like if it were in an actual record store where it would be sold as a 7-inch record—the most common form for vinyl singles.

Overall, the project takes an informal approach to develop the band’s brand identity through a laidback production ethic, creating a sense of “amateurism” and levity through the development of these different aspects on social media and in the Sunshine music video.