Music Marketing Blog Post #2

     This project has most definitely been the one that I enjoyed the most so far and the one that I feel I have benefitted from the most. The brainstorming process had both its pros and cons to the overall final project. On one hand, the case studies we worked on for other bands' promotional and distribution practices really helped make the marketing strategies we chose for our band a much smoother process. We also organized and sorted out each person's roles from the beginning, so instead of accidentally having two people working on the same thing, each person had their own part of the project they were assigned to. The day we started the project, we made sure to have general feel and idea of the band so that when each person started their work, the idea of the band expanded but the root remained the same. However, the pre-production stage of the music video was actually a little detrimental. We had originally planned to shoot a storytelling/promo combination. Once we had finished the first shooting session on Friday, we realized that there was way more promo (we had filmed the band performing in a garage that night) footage than we had anticipated. By Sunday (our second and final shooting session), our original idea and storyboard had been completely discarded. 

   

     Sunday, we met up at Veronica's house to finish the shooting. Rather than our original idea of a breakup, we changed the video to be a complete promotional video. We decided to shoot a mock photoshoot. While we already had footage of the band performing, we thought it was also a good idea to show the band interaction. We molded the rest of the shooting process around showing the band's relationship, and we luckily ended up shooting a lot of footage.

     

     The rest of the week was spent finishing our presentation and post-production. On Sunday, we all had already finished our parts of the presentation (for the most part). By Wednesday, we were putting our finishing touches on the project (mostly just editing social media posts, magazines, and websites to show the band rather than our previous placeholder image). I started editing the footage on Tuesday which ended up being a very lengthy process as I am not the most experienced editor. Thursday was our last day of class before the project was due, so we all checked each other's work to make sure everything fit together and then began writing our script for the presentation. We wrote the script on a google document to make sure that no body repeated information or had the wrong information. The project was due on Friday so between Thursday and then everyone began recording their lines and putting it into the Canva document. I finished editing the video and changing anything I had gotten feedback on. Honestly, one of the hardest part of the project was getting the video into the Canva document. Since it was too big of a file, Canva wouldn't just let me import it in and any attempt to compress the video would take hours and lower the quality. What I ended up having to do was publishing the video into Vimeo and then embedding the link into Canva, Unfortunately, every time we tried downloading the presentation as a video with our audios already recorded in, the video would not automatically play. In the end, we posted both the video presentation without the video and the Canva link with presenters mode in hopes that it will work for anyone trying to watch it. Finally, we were able to submit the project.

     Being one of the first longer project we've had to work on, it was at times hard to balance all the components and due dates. Eventually though, our group fell into a rhythm and made good pacing to have everything finished in time. I really liked getting to work on the video production because I feel like it's been the project that we've had the most creative freedom. It was nice to plan out mise-en-scene elements and shot composition having already learned about it in class. I also think that in general this may on of the longest group projects I've ever had to work on, so I learned a lot of how to work with another group (especially one I had never worked with before) and how to blend and adapt to everyone's creative ideas. This project makes me feel really good about the Cambridge portfolio, I am really excited to get to work on another long-form project like this one. I feel like so much I learned in this project I can use to benefit my portfolio.