One of the best ways to promote your music is through the use of video. While not all of us have the massive budgets sometimes at play in the world of MTV, not of all of us are happy with the results of a handheld camera in the rehearsal room either.
And there’s something inherently viral about a great, clever, funny or surprising music video. How many times were you sent The JCB Song, Here It Goes Again, Pork and Beans, or I’m Lame?
So in order to get something up on YouTube or Vimeo – something that can then be embedded on the band’s webpage, Facebook or MySpace profile – something that looks really professional but doesn’t cost more than a house… where do you turn?
I recently stumbled across Radar Music Videos. It’s a site that connects independent video producers with musicians, with some quite spectacular results. For quite realistic budgets, there are some very impressive music promo clips.
But the best thing about Radar is the fact that it’s a community. You can see the work of a number of filmmakers (and the bands whose videos they’ve shot), comment on their work, read ratings, get feedback and generally know what you’re getting before you commit yourself to anything.
To date, I haven’t seen much else like it. I’m sure there’s something out there, but I’m not finding it.
There are, of course, thousands of fledgling independent film-makers out there. Students finishing media courses at the local university, enthusiastic TV employees looking for a weekend project, hobbyists and even high-end professional production houses who take on low budget projects.
The trick is to find someone whose work you already like – and try to work with them. There are good deals to be had, and sometimes a clever idea will beat a glossy production. But even a clever idea will require somebody who knows how to communicate that through the medium of video.
What’s your experience of getting a budget clip filmed, and getting it out there? Who do you recommend? Any tips?
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I recently played around with tubemogul and reviewed them too.
http://blog.timelineonline.org/2008/07/tolkien-and-tubemogul-4-video-tips-too.html
For free you can have a total of 150 video deployments. Each site you upload to counts as 1 deployment. Thus by uploading 1 video to all 17 sites you can almost upload 6 videos every month. If you don’t have an account with a site you can sign up from within Tube Mogul itself. After a few days you also get to see the number of views for each site and handle comments too all from 1 interface. Did you think of a few more tags you would like to add, well you can do that too from within Tube Mogul. Since then I believe 2 more sites have been added for a total of 19 though not positived on that.
Also see what your fans can manage regarding making a video for you they might surprise you.
Coming from TV and Film production, I put together a uber low budget music vid for them using Iron Box Films, a great little company – the director wanted the vid for his showreel so we did most of it for free. The student way can quite often get surprising results. Also check out places like http://www.shootingpeople.org and Talent Circle which are filmmakers communities and have loads of people looking to expand their showreels.
Happy filming!
It’s spot on to lament the difficulties of finding someone to manage the creation of an affordable, yet still “quality”, promo video. I’ve tried several initiatives to try and achieve this. Consequently I now have a family of three promos which will form part of my 2009 endeavours. Five lessons I’ve learned that immediately spring to mind as potentially helpful to Newmusicstrategies viewers include:
1 Designers – After banging your head against the web-search brick wall (there’s quite a few ways to say “music vid directors”) you can easily reach the verge of giving up. Yet you probably already know someone who knows someone… I found the most important ‘connectors’ in my world were graphic designers. I asked people (that I’d known quite by chance) at printers and design companies if they knew of anyone who’d be able to do it. The joy was that they all did. This got amplified by the fact that they see what you want as fun, rather than work. This tangential approach proved a winner, because it seems that anyone you know in an artistic career, will have been to college with several people that branched off into the world of video.
2 Payment – You need to think how you’re willing to pay for something that may set you apart. Several people I’ve talked to that go beyond mere performance capture like to charge per second of output. The going rate for one second of 3-D cgi when I last discussed it was as much as £100, ouch! Perhaps time for an edited ‘video mix’… The other advice here is to agree a fixed-price fee. I also paid my guys half-upfront, balance on completion, which seems to be commensurate with a genuine, trusting partnership.
3 Location – Why restrict yourself to people in the same town? Trawling sensibly through the web can lead to some real revelations. I bet someone in Wellington provides a more attractive rate than someone from Manchester. The Majors have known this for years. I even bumped in to Will Young at a slightly exotic airport once after a couple of days apparently filming some Top Gun-style jaunt (unlike me, he flew home First).
4 Output – Until you fall over this issue at the end of your first commission you have no idea how costly it is. You think all you need is a file to post to youtube? Think again. Once the promo is complete, you’ll need to get that in as many formats as you can for all sorts of different deployments. There are studios in Soho that make a healthy living from the uninformed, taking their file in one format and magically converting it to others. Talk to your film-maker and see what they recommend. I always call this ‘porting’ with my guys, but this may not be a universal term.
5 Storyboard – Who comes up with the raw idea? It’s true you pay creatives in part to come up with ideas, and people I’ve worked with have conjured plenty. Yet one of the most fun things I’ve done, and certainly one that I look back on with much pride, during my musical projects, is riffing ideas for a promo with the eventual creator and personally contributing to the storyboard myself. To feel you’ve had a unique piece of imagination become something on-screen is as good as making the music in the first place :-) In addition, I would strongly advise you not to commit to anything until you’ve seen a “treatment”. This is like the vid-maker’s pre-sales proposal. You should not have to pay for this. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown storyboard, but must detail what will happen, at which timings, and the overall charges.
Any good for you?
This post is similar to to the one above but deals strictly with shooting real footage not graphics or CGI.
If you want your video to look high budget You may want to consider the following :
1) Your location – This could actually be 50% of your video – if you location doesn’t look interesting it will be hard for your video to look good.
You don’t have to shoot in an expensive looking location but I believe for best results its like this – if the place is run down let it be really run down. If you are going for an expensive look find a place that looks really expensive.
However, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
2) Your lights and camera
Being creative is fine but at the end of the day try to get professionals to do it. You wouldn’t let your lead guitarist be the dude who just finished reading “Guitar for Dummies”, without previous experience.
3) Plan for your shoot
Planning makes or breaks your video. It’s similar to you rehearsing before going on stage.
Yes, art should be spontaneous, but we don’t want to leave everything to chance, do we?
4) If you can , use 35mm lenses
This will make your video look like a ‘real’ video. Of course, it cost a bit extra and you need someone who knows how to operate the equipment but you will love the results!
5) (Andrew, I hope you forgive me this little self promo – it’s a great deal for independent artists. I’ve left it to the last so you can easily delete it, but please don’t ; ).)
If you have never shot a video before and you don’t know what to expect you can get a free PDF resource by visiting my website by clicking on my name above.
Also if you live in the UK, I have a very affordable deal for independent artist.
(Andrew, thank you for your patience, please let me know if I have broken your site rules.)
Hey, and since I have quite a bit of experience working in film and TV, I will be happy to answer any specific questions you may have.
Cheers.
I have no problem with you being helpful, John. Go for your life.
Thanks , Andrew!
A further tip of note has since occured to me about Location. If you’re on a shoestring budget it’s important to know that it is a fraught process to find a “free” place to shoot. I’ve had a couple of odd experiences of what you might initially consider the British disease of Jobsworths preventing filming. Don’t fall in to the trap of thinking it’ll be only the obvious places, like a Trafalgar Sq, where filming requires the necessary permits and fees. These can be lengthy and pricey to obtain. The chances are where you want to film are outside of your bedroom, so will be owned by someone else. And they’ll want to both grant permission and receive payment for the privilege.
Well i’m not a film producer and have no aspirations of being one but I do recognize that the music industry is now a visual as well as audio world. With that in mind I started putting together little videos that I did with a Flip Camera and edited with iMovie.
No where near professional quality but good enough for YouTube and good enough to garner us a lot of interest in our project….
http://universalindie.com/rock-stars-by-full-fam.html
Can I be ultra low-fi and go several steps back from fully fledged video, to slideshow-with-music? There’s no excuse to release a track without some visuals, as you can make a slideshow of stills (with some pretty cool effects to enliven it) at http://www.onetruemedia.com It’s one of the few sites that lets you upload your own music track. At the end of the process you get the usual embed code, plus an option to post to youtube.
Well, we just got our video finished. Luckily for me I have many friends who are architects, one of which studied at UCL and part of the course was CGI work. Simon Kennedy, who made the video for us wanted to branch into music video making, and asked if we would guinea pig for him. The result was spectacular:
http://www.vimeo.com/1928482
The video was made with only the costs of the costumes, camera hire, make-up artists and 3D anatomy software, it came to around £500. He worked tirelessly for months, so patience was the name of the game, but the results speak for themselves.
I’m not sure what he plans to charge now he has done one, but you can always ask him:
http://www.myspace.com/simon_kennedy
If you’re looking for a budget video, I also know a very good and competent music video maker, Tarquin Sutherland of Big Multimedia (he can make videos from around £500 upwards.
Contact him here:
http://www.myspace.com/bigmultimedia
Hope this helps someone. Remember, make friends with architects!!
Making friends with all multi media people can help greatly. Just in case anyone is interested follow the you tube link – the music vid is still in post but the ‘making of’ shows the scale we achived. It was made for under a £1000 though did require a lot of contacts and pulling in favours. Also making friends with people in TV helps as often they want to branch out and have the contacts to do deals and get favours.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yonNVvqy9HI
@The Problem Being,
Wow,,, that’s a damn good video!!!! Incredible…. too bad he’s not located in the U.S. because he’s right in my price point.
I wish I could find someone in the US who could do this type of job for $500. I’d use him all the damn time.
PS: Great song as well….
thanks! it did require a lot of favours, so I couldn’t do it all the time. try http://www.shootingpeople.org – I think they have a US section and I’m sure there must be plenty up filmmaker websites with talented people wanting to make something great.
ktb
PS their website is http://www.slashedseataffair.com fyi.
Hi Universal,
Thanks very much! :)
Though Simon is definitely set to charge for his services, he is still approachable and you are able to negotiate. The filming took ONE DAY in front of green screen with a couple of DV cams well placed, and a couple of very well placed lights. My suggestion is to shoot the video in the States (following the directions on how to use and light a green screen) and then send the DV tapes to the ol’ UK and get the post-production done here.
Contact both Simon and Tarquin for more information. Simon will be the expensive option as he worked ALONE on our video for months! He would need at least 1 or 2 more people this time and his costs of working and making a living would come into the equation. Tarquin specialises in BUDGET video making, although obviously if you want a more ‘stunning’ and complex video, the costs go up. If you film it over there, this would bring the price down considerably as he would only be doing the post production, I guess the same in Simon’s case too. Have a think and contact them. I know Tarquin for sure has worked with artists in both the States and South Africa, and with material sent to him from abroad. Nothing is impossible ;)
Contact them!
I was lucky in that I knew a video enthusiast and he had access to Imperial College’s studio and he did a video for us for free. I was unlucky after that since he got too busy to do any videos for us after that…or any vidoes for himself even for that matter.
That was a year ago…and I’ve been looking for producers since…but this thread is a live saver for me, I will def look at it!
The video I was talking about is Crap Day as the main video on our youtube site:
http://www.youtube.com/donkeyboxrocks
Hi
Just wanted to elaborate a little on the tips and suggestions posted here – all great stuff.
We headhunt award winning directors, people who’ve made viral hits, cool music videos we find around and about. In our 1700+ network, we’re very proud to have the winner of the UK Music Video awards, budget category and both winners of the Antville videos ‘new talent’ category, the Radiohead winners, people who’ve won D&AD, Cannes Lions etc etc.
There’s no risk for clients to try the service – it just takes a little time to get the brief together, once it’s up it’s advertised to all these directors and more. If clients decide to commission we take 15% from budget and if the budget is more than £1k (though can be any currency), we will also promote on our channels for free – where we guarantee ‘natural’ views of at least thousands and for some clients, these have been hundreds of thousands of natural views. There is no cost of the client decides not to commission.
We always suggest to clients they try us as well as personal contacts they have: there’s nothing to lose and potentially new contacts and a access to a music fan promo network to gain.
But if people want to source directors themselves, as well as the very excellent Shooting People as recommended by others, we look for talent in Antville.org, Vimeo music video groups, Promonews.tv and ShotsRingOut.
Hope it’s ok to add this here, all best
Caroline
company director, Radar Music Videos
I have just been through the process of organising a film cilp for one of my songs. It was great experience, a lot of fun and definitely a good promotional tool for all involved.
My advice, however, would be, Start Local. Friends of mine run a film company, (weddings, short films, corporate, advertisements) and they have recently started doing film clips for bands and artists. For a budget of $600 AUD we managed to hire equipment, shoot and edit a clip over a period of about 5 days.We sourced dancers through friends and from a local university and had volunteers and helpers coming out of our ears.
Here is the final product: http://pretensionmusic.blogspot.com/2009/05/video-what.html
The key thing that we have learnt is that the film and music makers (and dancers, and makeup artists, and photographers) are often in the same boat. We are all trying to get our name out there, get noticed, secure a position in the professional world. We want to get involved and we have the drive to get a great product out there.
Thanks for another great post Andrew. I read it a while ago but I’ve now had the experience too!
would like to meet up with u.i wana shoot a music video in low budget.pls eail me or send a message to my facebook inbox(kemi amos)aand i’ll get back to you.thanks
hello john Essiam ,message from kei amos is for you.
Hello, I would just like to comment and say thankyou for posting this, I initially came upon this post for my college research, however I myself am a freelance media producer and the link you have posted seems very useful to myself and my business partner :)
Mizz Ruby