Music Marketing Project

The Music Marketing Project our group just completed was a total team effort. It required an unbelievable amount of collaboration, discussion, and organization. Without any of those components, to be honest, it could have been a disaster! In the end, I feel we pulled off a challenging task that resulted in us having an amazing appreciation for the process of filmmaking!

Our group was definitely open to many great ideas. Everyone had a say in this project. We really wanted to maintain organized, and doing this allowed us to stay on top of it and complete our project without a rush. We started off by choosing our song. We automatically went with the first song as it was very unique, and that was what we were going for. After selecting the song, we began to brainstorm different ideas regarding what our music video would look like. Initially, we wanted to do blurry shots with flashing lights, but the team loved when I suggested that the main character should have a mask with a secret identity to create suspense. We still did include the different color flashing lights in our music video to create an EDM vibe, but we wanted our central focus to be our main character. 

In the following few classes, our group brainstormed what our main character would look like. We took inspiration from the former singer Marshmallow and his mysterious identity. Using this information and research, I decided to create our logo. Our logo consists of x mark eyes and a stitched-looking smile (shown below). We chose this because it goes with the EDM vibe and amplifies the mystery around the character. We all decided to utilize everyone's strengths as a group, and mine is in the creative process, so we decided that I would do most of the designing. 

We really wanted our merch line to stand out! To do this, we decided to create a limited-edition merch line that makes our fans feel a sense of urgency. Our merch line consists of hoodies, t-shirts, hats, beanies, and more to come in the future. We used our sinister-looking mask for limited-edition merchandise. The merchandise will effectively promote the rykerstrikes brand as our fans display them to the public. We also have our all-time merchandise, which consists of Ryker's name with a lightning bolt to go with the electricity of the EDM style of music. Our group agreed on using neon colors in contrast with the dark to enhance the mood of our project. 

Rykerstrikes merchandise:                           Limited edition Rykerstrikes merchandise

As for our music video, we all got together and joined minds. The team worked quickly and efficiently because we wanted to get to the post-production editing process. We created our mask for the video using a few items. We had a plain white mask as our base, and we used glowsticks that Berkly (one of my partners in the project) had at her house. We made the shape using several glowsticks and tape (as shown below) creative, right! We filmed in several areas of the location we were filming at. We started off at the sidewalk, then the park, then inside a dark room in Berkleys home. We got several shots/ angles for our music video, but the editing was a crucial part of reaching our desired look, feel, and vibe of the video. 

The post-production process involved coming to a consensus on the details which we felt were important to making this music video stand out. We eliminated some things that we thought we would use such as unnecessary clips of our music video (B-roll). We also decided to integrate cool special effects into our music video to go with the color palate we were going for. The total post-production process was about 4-5 days. We really wanted our video to be unique, eye-catching, and provocative.  

                                               Editing techniques examples: 

Leading up to the presentation there was a lot of anxiety. The team wanted to make sure the presentation was professional, informative, and covered all aspects of the hard work that we did. We wanted to make sure that the presentation flowed and didn't go off-topic. We kept our audience engaged by adding a personal touch by giving them glow sticks to create audience participation during the presentation. Our group decided to split the presentations into parts and have each person present a certain aspect of the project. We selected Vanessa to discuss the distribution/ marketing trends & target audience. Then Berkley discussed marketing and distribution. We then transitioned to my part about the Campaign Outline. Douglas explained the website and the meaning behind our music video. Berkley concluded the presentation by recapping all the important points of the Rykerstrikes video presentation and marketing.

The music marketing project was a great learning experience. It taught me the fundamentals of how to work as a team, how to combine our ideas into a concept that utilized all the different themes, techniques, and terminologies that we have learned in this class. All the different aspects of this project will help me in Cambridge Portfolio because it required the team to practically apply the knowledge we learned from creating a theme for our video, how to shoot the video, post-production work, and presenting the total concept to the audience.