Music videos are an essential part of your band's identity that will no doubt help grow your audience. The challenge is finding the right cinematographer to meet your band's goals.
Setting Goals
Goals you say? Having a music video made might be part of your band's larger set of goals, but the video itself must have it's own set of goals.Setting goals for your music video will help you narrow down one or two possible cinematographers from sea of people to choose from.
I could get into the weeds about SMART goals, but instead, just don't overthink it. Some examples of goals you want to acheive with your music video might be:
- Stay within a particular budget
- Launch video by a particular date
- Enhance the image of the band
- Increase engagement and grow your fan base
The goals listed above don't go too deep into specific numbers like 100K views on Youtube within one month. In my opinion, as long as you are improving over previous records, you're doing good - but setting specific goals are completely up to you - just remember to set realistic goals. Another reason I don't go into concrete numerical goals is that it really depends on the artist's current following or the artist's potential to break through. Breaking through is another discussion for another day.
Stay Within Your Budget
Your budget will most easily help narrow down who should shoot your music vid. If you are hoping for a quality on par with Blink-182's One More Time video and you're on a modest $10K budget, don't get your hopes up. Those video productions can easily run past $1M. It helps to do some research and educate yourself on how much music videos typically cost. Don't be afraid to get quotes from several filmmakers in your area to help you come to a better informed decision.
The majority of the music videos I shoot are local bands in the Kansas area. Most of them have full-time jobs or are students and are people who either A) hope to break through with their next hit / album, B) create music simply for the love of it or C) both A and B. Those bands and artists typically land in the $2K or less budget range. It's really difficult to expect a national breakthrough to happen with that budget unless you have an absolute banger of a song and the music video fits the vibe of the song well. However, that budget will get some noticeable push in engagement and having a solid music video helps bands promote themselves to other bands and venues to land better gigs.
On the other hand, you could shoot the video yourself with a few of the band member's cell phones. I've seen very lo-fi music vids perform pretty well but most were of the punk / death metal core variety so lo-fi seems to work with those genres.
Launch Video by a Set Date
The launch date of your music video will help narrow your selection due to the limited availability of filmmakers and overall scope of the project. A well-executed music video takes time to develop ideas, develop pre-production plans, execute the production and edit. Depending on how ambitious the music video is, the delivery could take a couple of weeks to months - especially if the video requires VFX or animation.
Enhance the Image of the Band
Just because you spent a large sum of money on a music video doesn't guarantee it will fit with vibe or tone you had in mind. It is super important consider a filmmaker who is able to do the work up front - to ask the right questions and clearly communicate their vision of your song. Be sure the filmmaking process includes mood boards and visual references. If the video is more than a playthough a single space that contains storyline, be sure a script is provided that is in sync with timing of the song so you can mentally visualize what the director sees.
Most importantly, don't be afraid to provide feedback - especially during the pre-production stages when it is relatively simple to make changes that might otherwise cost more money to re-shoot.
Increase Engagement and Grow Your Fanbase
Most of every band's idea of success is to keep growing their fan base. Music videos are an effective way to help your followers identify with the band visually. If the video was well executed with the other previous goals in mind, this part should happen mostly organically. However, the likelihood of getting the video to be noticed by simply uploading to your Youtube channel will not be great. There are several strategies including paid placement and lots of guerilla marketing to get your video seen and I've written all about it here.
Summary
Setting goals for your next music video project will help you find the right filmmaker who will keep your project under budget (or close to it), deliver it on time all while pushing your band to new heights.
