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Music Video Production for Peanuts
Making a video to promote your musical act can be very
expensive. However, there are alternatives that you can
pursue with a little creativity and compromise. A local
cover band was targeting the lucrative college and
university market. Those that hired bands wanted to see and
hear the act before booking them. So, the band needed a
performance video to go along with their promotion kit.
The band didn't have any cash or resources to produce their
own video, so they came to me. I suggested that there was a
way to make their video, if they were willing to take a
somewhat unusual approach. They agreed and together we went
to a local public access cable television station. We
pitched the idea of producing a 30-minute program comprising
the band and their performances. The station producers
accepted the plan and we soon had an all volunteer crew
ready to produce the program.
Many towns have public access or community television that
is available to residents to produce and air their own
shows. Most of these productions are amateurish, but
occasionally a good one gets made. The bonus to using public
access facilities to produce your own show is you can make
it for free or very low cost. The downside is the production
values may be limited and the expertise is usually minimal.
With a little hard work, you can still produce a video that
makes for both a fine access show and an even better demo of
your musical act. Also note that you can't use public access
to advertise or blatantly promote yourself. You can just
make a show and air it. Of course, you can use copies of the
show to promote yourself in other ways. And that fact is
what makes this idea work with the ruthless self-promotion
philosophy.
For the band's demo, I decided a straight performance video
was too mundane. Instead, I set them up in a circle around
the drummer, much like the band was rehearsing and trying
new material. (The inspiration came from the Beatles "Let It
Be" film). The set used the raw studio with ladders, old set
pieces, and other behind-the-scenes matter. We even let the
camera and production staff show up in the video. The idea
was a relaxed, have fun atmosphere.
For the most control, the band lip-synced to studio tracks
that were remixed to be rougher, less produced sounding. We
combined these performances with snippets of rehearsal,
impromptu jams, short interviews with the band members, and
other such nonsense recorded live on the video set. For the
demo tape, we only used the lip-synched performances,
deleting all the extraneous bits. For the public access
version, we kept all the other material to make the
half-hour program. The community TV station had a
well-rounded show to air and the band had a 15-minute
performance video to use to land new gigs.
It cost only about $100 for videotapes (master and copies)
and a pizza party for everyone involved. The 30-minute
program not only played on the local cable station, but was
also picked up by the regional station which meant the band
appeared all over the Chicago area. The band's video demo
let them land several college and other party gigs, too.
It's not MTV, but it sure helped this band be more
successful.
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