Music videos are pretty essential for any artist promoting music online. Commissioning and then promoting music video can be hard if you don’t know the landscape. Here's a few tips to commissioning a great video.
What Kind Of Music Video?
Do you want to be in it? Do you have to be in it? People watch and share music videos if they’re compelling in some way – unusual, beautiful, funny, sexy are all things that work. Usually successful videos are well made, even if they have a guerrilla-film style. If you’re prepared to give up a personal appearance, you open up your music to a much wider range of video possibilities. You get to choose the best director in the world, not best director in travelling distance. For instance, you might be based in Tokyo but have your video made in Toronto.
An ‘open to ideas’ brief also increases potential storylines – your video could be a great story you never expected. You can always promote your/your band’s look in your live footage. If you do want to feature in your video, be open to other ideas beyond a straight performance. Everyone knows how a performance video goes, they’re predictable. I can’t think of any performance videos I find interesting, even really well made ones. There’s a stack of artistin-videos that are great though, where the band are characters or just participants in the overall action, I’ve linked some examples of good artist-in-video and non-performance videos below. Live action/ mashup / animation? Live action is cheapest, you can get more content for your budget.
Mashup can be great, but only usable if all the content is copyright cleared – video sites are getting better at spotting and taking down non-cleared material. Animation is expensive and time consuming. If budget is tight, give your animator plenty of time.
Where To Find Directors
01. Ask friends, fans, local art colleges.
02. Contact directors via YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo or MySpace. Most sites have 'featured video' sections where you get straight to the good stuff. Or find videos you like on music video blogs – google to find blogs.
03. Contact a professional production company or an online service like ours.
04. Run your own online competition for a video. This takes time and a sensitivity about what you’re doing – a lot of “make us a video for free” competitions get (rightly) treated with contempt by directors. If you’ve a lot of fans, have good prizes and if you’re happy with amateur/UGC videos, this could be a good strategy.
What Budget?
If you've zero budget try the first two contact groups above. Expect to get student directors who want to start or build their showreel. If you create a budget for your video, you'll interest more experienced directors, who’ll have showreels you can review.
How To Work With Directors
Get references from people who've worked with the director before. Were they great to work with or was the process fraught with problems? Be clear what you want in your video brief, how much money you'll spend on the video and when you want the video delivered. Get this agreed up front in writing, preferably with a contract. We link to a sample contract on Radar in the media kit menu. If you're spending money, be prepared to fund production up-front, but hold a good % back against both rough cut approval and final delivery. The rough cut is as it sounds, a nearly finished version of your video. All the structure will be in place, with just some minor editing, colour corrections and etc to do. It's not fair to ask for major structural changes or re-shoots at this point, so be sure to have created a clear brief from the outset. Above all, keep talking with your director. If something isn't going the way you like it, talk about it and be prepared to compromise if necessary – your aim is to get a great video.
The Wave Pictures video was made many ‘000s of miles away from the artist – and has generated hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. This Black Bikini Alpha video combines performance with a cracking good and sexy storyline You can find other articles in this series, including “How To Promote Music Videos Online” at RadarMusicVideos.com
By Caroline Bottomley, founder RadarMusicVideos.com a matchmaker between artists and labels and most of the best online music video directors. Radar also promotes music videos extensively online.
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