Music Marketing Project

The Making of our Marketing Project

    The process of completing this project went fairly well. Our group kept in mind the lesson about the learning process at the beginning of the year, so we made sure to follow the process consisting of four p's and one r: research, planning, production, post-production, and presentation. 

Research

    Once we received the genre of music, we asked questions and researched it; the genre of "throwback" was not necessarily the easiest to understand however after some analysis of the songs we received we realized it meant songs that have a retro feel to them. Out of the three songs we received, we decided to choose "Tonight", an upbeat song with an 80's style to it, and our research of artists and music production companies began. This part of the process was somewhat hard and a bit of a tedious task, but we realized later on in the project how crucial it was and how much easier it made our life in both the production and post-production processes. Researching the genre was done, and so came a difficult yet very fun part, brainstorming.

Planning

    Brainstorming is an essential part of any project, but when working in a group of five, it may be difficult to get ideas across that everyone understands and come to compromises with everyone. After a lot of back and forth, we decided to do an artistic music video that somewhat represented the lyrics of the song we chose. In this part, we also decided that we would keep a common retro vibe throughout the video keeping the main theme of loneliness prevalent. When we reached this point in our process, we found it necessary to come up with a schedule in order to complete everything by the due dates and organize when everyone was available to film, a picture of the document we used for this segment is included.

 

    After completing these steps a storyboard began being created, and as we all pitched in ideas of what to include, one of us illustrated it. We did something similar for the media context worksheets as well; we all pitched ideas of artists that might fit the criteria that we needed to cover, and we split up the sections of the assignment. 

Production

   Then came time to film, one of the group's favorite parts. We had so much fun focusing on the shot compositions as well as the mise-en-scene elements and it was such an exciting part of this process for us. We tried to split up filming days evenly so we would do 3-4 scenes per day; this plan would have worked out if it hadn't been for a delay on the first filming day but once we got back on track, it came together pretty easily. We had already made a list of equipment and props that we would need previously, so when we started filming, decorating the shot environment and utilizing props was a pretty simple aspect. We had also set what colors and tones we wanted each scene to have beforehand in order to achieve the look we wanted in all the shots during the production.

Post-Production

    Editing is by far my favorite aspect of any project, so I was extremely excited to begin building this video. We had planned our schedule so that we could have 3 days to edit which worked out perfectly because I got to split my time up and not overwhelm myself with the editing. I probably still sat for 3-4 hours editing on the first day but that was just because I tend to lose track of time when I'm in the "editing zone" and I love it. 

    As I was editing, I would send drafts to my group and they would give an intake on what should be changed. We color-corrected every shot and added grain to all of the scenes set in the 80s or that had a retro vibe to them to add to the visual elements and stick to our brand; we also made a last-minute decision to change the aspect ratio of those shots. After many nested sequences and Adobe Premiere crashing a couple of times, our music video was done.

Presentation

  The making of our PowerPoint was simultaneously done as the music video. Once we had gotten to this part of our project, everything was very easy since we already had all the information we needed from the research and planning aspects of our project. When making the presentation, the only conflict we ran into was choosing what we wanted to do for a creative marketing idea but one of us had a genius idea to make the music video premiere like a drive-in movie theatre to stick with our retro brand.

Reflection

    Overall, I have a lot of major takeaways from this project, one of the main ones being that the learning process and having an organized schedule when doing a project is extremely beneficial to the final product. I also learned a lot about the music business as a whole and how music production companies use marketing and distribution techniques in order to cater to their audience, sometimes, without the audience even realizing it. This to me was extremely amusing because it was only after this project that I began to realize how all of the artists I listen to take part in these practices and by their use of branding techniques they were probably able to draw me in as well as many other fans. Music and video production have always been two things that spark my interest, so this project felt like it was made for me and I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it.