Creating Videos Independently.
The visual aspect of music is becoming increasingly important for promoting, exposing and marketing our band, and all indie artists are aware of it. Considering this, I have come across a lot of indie bands that claimed to be afraid of making their own videos. The big myth deliberately created by video experts of the industry for their own selfish reasons, holds back the artists from taking the first step towards recording their own videos. Thanks to the common mythological assumption that it is very complicated, expensive and technically demanding to create publishable video content, many bands don’t even try to explore this territory which is today as accessible to us as the audio recording field is.
The invention of internet has had many direct and indirect effects on the music industry – both good and bad. I have written a series of articles about the evolution of the Indie Music Industry. An important factor behind online music communities beginning to form is the benefit of social media associated with the rising popularity of the internet. Additionally, the new strategies for marketing, promotion and advertising offered by the internet, allow indie artists and bands to connect directly with their fans and easily distribute their work to a highly expanded audience. One such interesting approach to advertising is to release free music as a means to market your live performances. Another way is to carry CDs with a glimpse of your upcoming work to the festivals and tours where you are performing, to give out to those who are awed by your performance. While all of this has been made possible, I fail to understand why some indie artists still don’t know that making videos is also one of the things that have been made easy by the internet.
We are indie artists because we have not yet been signed, or do not want to be signed up with a label. We want to be independent and have full control over our creative ideas. The only problem is that we have never independently created a video or audio recording before because we thought that it was too complicated to do.
How sad! Do you understand that in order to be truly independent, it is necessary for you to learn how to produce music and video content yourself?
There are costly looking videos and there are costly videos. You need your video to be costly looking, however, it doesn’t actually have to be costly. As discussed in my blog Making Music With Less Money, the look of the video isn’t all that matters. Jack Conte’s videos, shot on iPhones and other not very good cameras got a large number of likes and hits. They were an overdose of creativity. The better the lighting the better the video. Period. iPhones are famous for performing poorly in dim light. They look the best on the grounds where sun is the only source of light. Either shoot outdoors on a bright day, or find a friend who can arrange some good lights for the shoot. Pull some serious favours.
Some successful artists have admitted that they started messing around with recording videos in the subway, in the bathroom, at parks etc. Just start shooting video ideas with your phone and suddenly you will see a lot of things seem possible. There is no need to buy an expensive video editing program, you can subscribe to lease an editing software for a monthly fee and can quit at any moment.
Watch video editing tutorials on Youtube. You will discover many extremely helpful courses on video editing as well as courses about how to use common editing software. Generally, a lot of audio and video software related topics are available across the web to learn from. Just subscribed and start taking courses while working on your record.
If you follow the success story of today’s famous artists, you will easily fond a lot of them whose first video was shot on an iPhone or a Samsung, which was later edited on their laptop. Just get on and get going. The internet is full of applications and websites to help you with your videos. It is going to take a while to learn, but it is totally worth the time, money and effort.
