Music Marketing Blog Post #2

The music marketing project was a more of a difficult one in my personal experience. The freedom of being able to express whatever you please at your own pacing is a new kind of approach to a project. Because of the amount that my group had to cover, we had to plan our entire process. However, because of the little due dates and the entire project being due in over a week, we were often distracted and off-task. This is a choice that we regret as when the due date came closer, the stress of a huge project being due set in. The team's first step was to plan out what to do first, and that was to design our brand and what our artist would look like. Brainstorming was a long a process because there are various ways to go in terms of style, hair, and personas, but we eventually ended on a loving persona and soft style as we felt it would fit our genre, pop, the best. We had come up with potential distribution and marketing trends, including making a TikTok trend with the #MAISTIME. (Our artist's name is Melvin Mais, pronounced "my").

When discussing our video, the song we were given was replayed multiple times as we all tried to pitch in our ideas for what we felt the vibes of the songs are for the storyboard. This process was also slightly difficult as all of us had different ways and ideas to capture the music's melody, shots, angles, movements, and colors. After days, our group had come up with a solid plan, using friends as actors, and establishing all our filming days and locations. The filming process in itself was much less difficult than we had imagined it to be, as our storyboard was a well-founded plan and we all knew exactly how to execute it. Minor tweaks were done during the shooting just to ensure the smoothness of the music video, too. The video shooting process also allowed all of us to pitch in our different ideas of how the shots would end up and the entire team was able to learn more about the importance of angles, composition, and movement. The shooting process was in the span of around a week since some of the teams schedule did not match up and other actors were busy.

Before the video was finished, the team also considered starting the presentation just so all the work would not be left until the last minute. We made sure that the presentation had the appropriate colors as well as a style we wanted our artist to be associated with. We had plenty of fun coming up with brand deals, what to include in the slides, visual elements, picture layouts, and merch designs in the slides. We were able to split up the work and work smoothly through about 3/5 of the presentation. The video was on plan to be finished with more than enough time to edit, and embedding the music video was one of the last steps involved in finishing the presentation, right after setting the social media accounts into the slides. 

However, with around 2 shots left and around 4 slides of our presentation left with multiple days to monitor and edit our project, something unexpected happened.

One of our team members as well as one of our actors had a tragic event happen to someone close to them. This left the rest of our team to have to improvise and cut the music video short. Even though multiple days would have been enough to finalize our project, assuming all would be going well, we were unprepared and stressed that we would not find a resolution in time to submit. The team was forced to improvise, cutting the video short and replacing one of the actors for 1 shot, and entirely removing another shot. Because of the sudden changes, our presentation was left unfinished until we could find a solution about the time and missing members. Our group had discussed what each of us could do, all with different schedules. Since some had a wide open timetable while others were busy until late night, or even dealing with something personal, we all realized we had to finish this project quickly with the due date virtually running at us. With each passing day, we slowly but surely completed the music video. It had not looked exactly how we planned originally, but nonetheless we all loved how it looked given the circumstances. This allowed us to continue on and finish our presentation and finish the project in time. 

Overall, this project was moderately heavy on my team. It has helped me realize, more than anything, that time, alongside quality, is one of the most important aspects when approaching a large, or even small project. If our team had started earlier and did not spend the first few days getting carried away, we would've been much deeper into completion with our project by the time something unexpected could happen, causes days less worth of stress for everyone. An aspect I will be using for my Cambridge portfolio is having a firm and steady plan. A plan allowed us to film our shots and know exactly what to do with no delays in the days that my team was working and all was well. I now know that next time, plans have a possibility of failing or something unrelated may interfere with progress, which is why I will leave more space for improvement.