The first part of the Music Marketing project we worked on was the research we did on Alternative music. I completed two of the case studies for Modest Mouse and The Shins (I love both of them so much! I was so excited to be assigned this genre). Sophia did the case study on Arctic Monkeys and Bri did the case study on Gorillaz. The two of them also each worked together on the historical information on Warner Bros Records and SubPop. This research component wasn't without it's (minor) setbacks. I was so excited about the project that I did a whole case study for Nirvana without realizing we had to choose a band that had made music in the past 5 years... so that was a major learning experience.
Under the music video component of the project, we were given 4 different songs to choose from. We were torn between "Float On" by Modest Mouse and "Night Running" by Cage the Elephant, but we settled on the latter. We believed that this song was the best fit for the storytelling music video we wanted to create. The first step of our brainstorming process was to listen to the song a bunch of times (I would put the song on multiple times a day and let my mind wander to see if I could come up with any creative ideas). We also each printed out our own copy of the lyrics so we could better understand the message behind the song. It would also later help us to block out each shot when storyboarding. In class, my group and I concluded that the meaning behind this song was the difficulties of running from/solving stressful problems, while simultaneously feeling free as you are escaping. Since we wanted to tell a story in our music video, we concluded that the best way to approach this would be to create a literal problem that the character will face. This obstacle will be horror related, and we plan on carrying this out in post-production editing.
Given the title and lyrics of this song, we decided it would be most appropriate to shoot the music video at night. Lighting will be one of the main challenges we will be faced with while shooting at night. We plan on checking out a lighting kit, as well as bringing strong flashlights to the set. Our main obstacle would probably be time. We tend to get carried away with brainstorming and coming up with huge complex plots with highly detailed sets. We realized that sometimes, the best music videos are simple stories with visual interest. Our group will be meeting on January 23rd to storyboard, plan out supplies we may need, and further plan out the logistics of this project. Tomorrow we will continue to delegate the individual tasks for the marketing aspect of this project.
