Dreaming

The first thing you should do is talk to them about how this process works a little bit. What your plan is. Some acts will want more input on the visuals than others. If your band is a gothic speedmetal act, they’re probably going to want dark, spooky visuals or something. Your job here is to help them sell their band’s image. Music video is like a less douchey cousin advertisement. You’re advertising the band, not Charmin. So lay some ground rules. Get them to tell you who they want to be in the video. Let them know how much you want to share the conceptualization process with them. Just so everyone’s on the same page. Then go listen to the song.

When you’re in this period, you should find ways to just be alone with the music. Play it on loop. The first time you hear it just let it happen. Don’t try to listen too closely to any part of it. Just see how you feel about it. Then pick up a pen and play it again.

What you’re doing here is brainstorming with yourself. You shouldn’t be filtering yet. Just get as many ideas down as you can. Here are some notes I wrote for a song I recently considered making a vid for:

Landsacape portraiture

Push edits

Super colorful, even, glossy lighting

Sense of community: portraits of who “this is for”=>facets on a rubik’s cube? proof sheet?

seasons? represented by costumes

That seems pretty stupid, right? That’s a small chunk from a page of similar nonsense. Most of this will be bad. That’s fine. Here’s a couple of things that I did poorly on: there’s lots of punctuation, meaning I slowed down to type in commas and quotes. This doesn’t need to be grammatically correct. However, it should be comprehensible to you. I have no idea what I meant by ‘Push edits’. Be clear with yourself. Be efficient. I did this one on a computer, but really I should have done it on a piece of paper. I like to be able to put my words anywhere, draw a quick picture, draw arrows between things, &c. What you’re writing are visuals that occur to you, themes and motifs you notice, colors, types of shots, anything else. I find being heavily caffeinated helps this process. I haven’t tried it under the influence of anything else, but I imagine some interesting things could happen. I’m not really trying to have artistic crutches, though. Personal choice.

So you’ve played the song through dozens of times. Written copious notes. Great. Now take a break and spend a couple of days doing other stuff. Your subconscious and occasionally your conscious will address the ideas you have had and do interesting things with them.

Schedule a meeting with your band (and their manager if they have one). Before you go, take your notes and pick the best ideas in them.

Things to consider: some awesome videos are extremely composed. Some are single shots. Some cut every two seconds and have lots of scenes. If there’s one idea that stands out from the dozens and you feel confident that it will an excellent video make, don’t feel guilty killing all the others.

I make a bullet-pointed list for myself and in this second meeting pitch a video to the band. They will generally get really excited because I’m a visual artist and I’m doing something visually interesting with their music. Sometimes they totally hate my idea and I have to take it back to the drawing board. Usually when they hate it they are 100% correct. Recently I had an idea and pitched it to a band, only to see a video with the same goddamn idea a few days later. I called and told them I needed to change it so as not to make a video that was the same as another video. Once there is consensus on the concept it’s time to talk numbers. That’s Part 3: The Ever Lovin’ Dollar.

Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6