Welcome to Episode 90 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross and I'm here with Matt Hoos of Alive in Barcelona. How are you doing today, man?

I'm doing awesome. James. It's really nice to be back and to have a another podcast episode. We thought that last week was going to be the jumping back in point, but then ended up with the potential Covid case, so had to quarantine. It didn't have access to any of my fun recording equipment. So, so now we're back. Hopefully we can get some good stuff recorded. Oh yeah, that's the plan. And like I said before the call, I'm really glad that you did not have Covid. That's always good to hear.

It's the only positive, negative these days. That's right. That was probably my worst attempt at a pun ever. That wasn't even a pun. It was just bad. No dude, it's great. An oxymoron. A true oxymoron. Yeah. You know what the other oxymoron is? What's that, moron who breathes oxygen? Yeah. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about today. Our topic for today is six things you didn't think about for your music video and I'm just gonna say it right now. Music videos that are not something I have a lot of experience with.

So matt, you are going to be in charge of this one and I'm going to provide the color commentary wherever I can so please go ahead and dive right in. Okay, music videos, there's so much fun. Music videos are like, in my opinion, one of the more enjoyable parts about being in a band. Like it's a different form of creative expression, recording music and whatnot. There's times when it can feel really don't want to say forced, but that's what's required of you. You can't be a musician without making music, but you can be a musician without making music videos.

That's totally something that's possible. You can also have music videos that are like really stylized. There's like a whole bunch of different avenues that you can kind of take. You know, some people just do lyric videos. Some people like the guerrillas is a great example. All their music videos are animated. Okay, go. I know I've mentioned them before on the show. All of their music videos are like super high budget production to the maximum and they also fit really, really well with the branding of the song in almost every single case.

There are performance videos, you know, like some of the coolest videos I've ever seen her performance videos, some of the stupidest videos I've ever seen, our performance videos. So you really have this wide variety of avenues that you can take if you're going to focus on one little niche piece of art, like that's cool, you can develop a really awesome cult following with that and you can have a really, really successful career for like a long, long long time doing that or you know, you can be saying I'm gonna be trying to compete in these like mainstream markets and you know, I have to make sure that like everything's visually compelling and you know, the production quality has to be super, super high quality.

Remember when Macklemore was in Spokane Washington recording a music video, I can't remember which song it is, but in that music video they just have like people dancing in the streets, you know, and obviously they had to hire lots of actors and they had to get permits from the city and they had to like have streets closed down, they rented all sorts of crazy equipment and I want to say they're riding on these old school bicycles in the music video down the street, and it's just like very clearly there's tons and tons of money being poured into the production quality on this thing.

And so like he's competing at a level with a lot of us, we're nowhere near that level. These guys are assigned to the biggest record labels in the country. I've seen bands that have made incredible music videos on a very inexpensive budget, and I've seen bands that have like poured tons and tons and tons of money into a music video and it sucks. So it's important for you guys. You know, if you're an individual, it's a lot easier for you to kind of have creative control of what you're going to make.

If you're a collective or a band, there's a lot more pieces to the puzzle in getting together and talking these things through is like a really important process when it comes to, you know, like how do you want people to visualize you? This is really part of your image branding. And so like if you make a music video, one of your band members is like, I think would be awesome if we dressed up as clowns. Okay, well if that fits in with what you're trying to do, like if your branding is trying to be funny, then that will work absolutely terrible.

Music video that had a ton of airtime was turned down for what? Turn down for what? Yeah. You know that song, Unfortunately, it was a curse in a lot of musicians lives because it was like the second that a show would be over, that's like the song that people would put on. I literally hear that song every single day and the music video is terrible, but it's appealing to comedy and it's definitely not funny to me. I think it's like really immature, but there's a lot of people who really like that type of humor and so because he knew what he was doing with that music video, they're mostly like twerking and then they like to work so hard that there, but like slams through the floor or something like that.

And it just turns into this chaos thing of like people's but literally working through floors and it's just, it is what it is. Not really for me. If that's your thing, then awesome, I don't care, no judgment on anybody. My point is stick with whatever your branding needs to be. You wanna make funny videos, do that and do it hard. If you want to make serious videos, do that and do it hard, you want to make artistic masterpieces. That's going to take a little bit of thought a little bit of time and certainly some more money.

Some things that you should think about is just, you're never done, it's art and so like, there's always more embellishments, there's always more wonderful things that you can do. So making this collective decision for a creative masterpiece, write everything down, get everybody's opinions and then try to figure out ways to make them work because you can always add more and then you can pick and choose little parts you want to take out later. I just wanted to throw out an example of amazing branding in music videos and we're going to have to go back to 2000 and nine and gallows album Great Britain.

I've mentioned gallows on the podcast probably at least 10 times before, But Great Britain was their second album and it was their one and only album on a major label. They signed to Capris got a $1 million dollar advance and just went ham with it. They got strings and all kinds of crazy production on their album and released a metal core album when reprise was expecting more of like a green day pop punk sound. But everything was in line with great Britain because Great Britain was a political statement.

Every single one of the music videos was about the current state of the UK 12 years ago at the time of recording this episode. And so each video was very dark, it was gray, it wasn't black and white. The lighting was gray and moody and the different videos covered things like police officers with pig masks and all kinds of different things like that, showing the perspective of society that gallows had at that time. Specifically frank carter. I think he was the creative mind behind most of it, but I might be wrong And they even put out, I want to say like a 25 minute many movie which the individual music videos I think they took parts from, but they were also independent.

I'm not sure exactly what it was because it's been so long since I've watched it. But if you watch the movie and the music videos, they are all so on point with their branding. It's incredible And I have not seen any other artist With that level of branding and detail. Like obviously I've seen lots of artists with great branding but this one just stands out to me they're telling a story through everything they're putting out and that really made a difference in my opinion and they use that $1 million 41's music videos as examples because they were like their pop punk band and so like they have this like fun lighthearted feeling about them.

But then they also have like some songs, their album chuck. They were in like South Africa in the town that they were in civil war broke out. Like little civil skirmish live ammunition. You know people are shooting each other and actually it was a U. N. Representative named chuck That basically saved their lives and like lead them out of the fray into safety and so like chuck initially that wasn't supposed to be the name of the album but because this guy like saved their life they were like now we're naming this album chuck up until that point.

A lot of what some 41 had done was all silly. You have your songs like fat lip. If you go and watch the music video for fat lip which everybody should do. It's hilarious. You'll notice if you watch those music videos, their image branding is so on point that it's like the narrative of the music video is all about this swim contest between the punks and the jocks. Okay. Big point of contention in high school right? The punks and the jocks and so they're having this diving contest and it's absolutely hilarious.

Part of the video is a performance part. And when they're doing their performance part, they're playing in an empty pool. And so like even just the imagery of where the performance shots are being taken, in relation to like where the narrative is being taken, they tied together. If you have a music video where it's like you're playing in the middle of an open field, maybe it's papa roach, I want to say in the music video that all their performance stuff is in the middle of the field.

And it feels really weird because you're like, this has nothing to do with the content of the music video. Well, then throughout the course of the video, you actually get to a certain spot, like by the time it hits the bridge, the house that the main characters of the narrative are in, like, one of them catches the house on fire. Then as the house burns down and whatnot. Then you actually see that the field they're standing in the middle of is the field with the burned down house in the backyard.

Now, I really appreciated that because at first I was clueless. It wasn't like seeing one, I knew what was going on and they slowly but surely told a narrative and then that narrative kind of fit in with the imagery. By the end of the music video, taking back sunday, one of my favorite bands in history has a performance video or literally they're playing in the middle of the street, there's barricades around them and the camera just goes around them while they play the song with like traffic lights go.

It's like night time. It's one of the worst music videos I've ever seen in my entire life. Nothing about the lyrics make any sense with what's happening in the video. It was literally one of those things where they were like, well, we got to get a video out with this. Let's just take one single take and we'll put it out. It wasn't good. But it's different people's artistic expression. I've met people that are like, oh, have you seen the new Taking Back Sunday? You know, it's like, yeah, I did.

It was terrible. You know, some people told me it was great. Some people told me was awful. 741. If you go watch a lot of their music videos, um hell song is another one. They got a budget for a music video. Now, they could have said, all right, we want to throw this like we could get all these celebrities and we could do all these crazy funny things in this music video and we could get all these actors and global with this and they said or we could take this money and get dolls made out of every single popular character that we can think of.

We're going to get little tiny action figures made with everybody's faces on and we're gonna put all these people in our music video in doll form and it's going to be ridiculous and it was, but it was hilarious and for a long time some 41 kept with that really funny branding and a lot of their music videos, if you go watch still waiting, it's all about their manager changing their name from sum 41 to the sums because at the time all of the bands that were coming out where the white stripes, you know, it's super clever and they were doing stuff that was relevant or was like, oh yeah, you know like the strokes, the white stripes and he's like, oh the led zeppelins, right?

It's great. And people like what is going on with this music video, but it was funny and then they spent their music video destroying the set, which was like in my opinion, it was an artistic way of kind of saying like, yeah, we're going to do whatever we want. Doesn't really matter what our managers say, that's kind of at least how I took it. And you know, it was a fun video to watch for one of the more popular songs. Then fast forward to after chuck comes out, bring this all back full circle when chuck comes out.

They have a couple songs on there that are a lot more serious. There's a slow song on that record. I can't remember what the name of it is off the top of my head. But the music video, the imagery is wonderful. And they keep having these semi trucks pull through. They're trying to portray something that you want, imagine it being a front window marketing campaign but they're inside of semi trucks. So these semi trucks drive by and inside the back of the box that's like see through on one side and you know you can see them like having fun or whatever and on the side and she's like oh you know the the perfect whatever you know the perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect life.

And as you get to the end of this music video, the last person who you're getting to see is derek their singer and he's just sitting by himself alone in the back of this truck watching tv and on the side of the van it says you know the perfect life and as it continues to drive the f falls off of life and it just says the perfect lie. And it was very well done. It was very simple. You went from having this band that would put out just nothing but hilarious content.

Albums are called All Killer No filler. Does this look infected half hour of Power and it's true punk rock. And then you get into this more serious stuff and the imagery behind the music videos ties directly in with the gravity of the song. And that's so important with music videos. You have this mindset or it's like how do I put what I feel? What I really feel in my heart, what I would I hear and see in my mind how how do I a how do I create that?

How do I tell the director how to create that? And this is a really big issue comes up when recording music videos is like trying to get your director and you on the same page. So that's why it's important to be willing to sacrifice some of your more emotional responses. You know, if somebody says, oh, I want to do this for a music video and you're like, no, it has to be this way, it's like, well, just like a music producer might have some really awesome things to say about.

Like, this part should come in on one. It's going to sound better if it does a producer, a music video director producer, they are also going to have those same tricks of the trade. I know for us when we were playing metal in the Persevering Promise, we recorded a music video and we loved it, we're super happy with it. We went back to the same guy again, we tried to express what we wanted for this next music video and really what the types of imagery that we wanted.

And he filmed a bunch of these parts and then we were like okay, we go and get the first edit of the video. We were like this is nothing like what we wanted. We had said we wanted like silhouette type work and we used paper lung from under oath as a reference because that music video is absolutely incredible. It's a lot of green screen work, A lot of slow mo shots and a lot of just really, really impressive imagery, but a lot of silhouettes. And so when you have silhouettes specific way, you have to have a certain lighting Well he thought we wanted a different type of silhouette.

We wanted dark silhouettes, he thought we wanted light silhouettes. And so he had like light silhouettes superimposed over the screen of what was happening. And to all of us, we were like, this just feels super different. This doesn't feel like what we had artistically imagined. We paid money for that. We spent a lot of time on that. Guess what? We never ended up using it. I would actually equate that to have not having a treatment. I don't know how many of you guys know what a treatment is, but the treatment is basically like a little story board for your music video A lot of the time.

But you can get treatments from all sorts of filmography, furs and you say like, Hey, like here's my song, I was wondering if you'd send over treatment. Sometimes people are like, oh yeah, it's $50 for a treatment or you know, $25 for a treatment or 100 bucks for a treatment or whatever. And what they'll do is they'll create a whole narrative to your music video. So a lot of the time if you're unsure about how you want to approach things creatively, you can have like three or four different music video directors give you a treatment and then you can say, oh yeah, I like I like this, I like this, your creative industry, your art is music.

Well their art is film. And so when they say I'm going to send you this treatment, they're thinking about all the things that they can do, Their thinking about the ways that they can challenge themselves. They're thinking about their favorite tricks, techniques, their favorite settings. And if you're going okay, how do we do this? You know, let's start like James and I like to say start with the best possible product and then figure out how to cut the costs down. It's the same thing here with our videos, start with a great treatment and then you say, okay, how do we cut down on this?

Do I need four days of film time or can I implement a couple little tricks of the trade and cut down on that? Don't put all the weight on your own shoulders because there's a lot of like really small decisions or really hard decisions that you might have to make. And for us in all the music videos that we filmed, I'll tell you right now, the music video that went the best was the most in depth one. And the reason that one went too fast is because we had a treatment, we had a plan, we had makeup artists, we had actors, we had multiple different places that we had already talked to about whether or not we could film there.

We had planned Now there were things that didn't go according to plan, but that plan was totally invaluable and if anybody hasn't seen our music video zombies, you should go watch it. We filmed all of that and one day we had a makeup crew with us in our van. So when we would drive from location to location, we would actually have the ability to do new makeup or progressive makeup. And in our narrative, the makeup actually progressively changes. And so it was really important for us to even have a makeup artist there, which was great because now any time we need makeup for anything, we have a guy to call too.

So we have that long term connection, but we also have somebody who's, they already understand how that part of the art world works. So that was wonderful doing things like bringing extra changes of clothing. If you ever watch a, like a Taylor swift music video or Ariana grande or any pop artists, like every single scene, they're wearing different clothes. Every scene they probably have like six or seven outfits that they'll change between. You know, every other thing. They'll be complementary outfits and styles and you might not even necessarily notice that they're constantly changing their outfits, but go watch a taylor swift music video when you notice these things are rappers there, another really good example.

They change their clothes too. So if you go and take numerous pairs of clothes, then you can actually, I mean you could make it seem like you filmed all sorts of different things. And this is also a trick for photography to like if you want a bunch of photo content, a bunch of video content go one spot, wear one outfit, film something, go to another spot, change your outfit, Film another something go to a third spot. Film something with a third outfit on. And now it looks like you've done stuff for a week because you have like all this content and really you just kind of like spent a couple hours one day driving around, you paid 100 and 50 bucks to a photographer or whatever or filmography for or you know, this works for making your teaser clips to if you plan accordingly, if you don't waste that time that you have, if you get an awesome cinematographer or filmography in there and you're like, what do we do?

It's like what you do is you prepare yourself. The fact that you're here and you don't know what to do is already a bad situation. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you highlighted with having storyboards or treatments is so important because anybody can say, hey, let's do a live video and film was playing in a basement or wherever it is, but not having that. Even if you don't have a great editor in great camera, all that kind of stuff, having a good story board and knowing what you're gonna do going in makes a huge difference.

And I just wanted to highlight an artist who was in the Bandhive community called We demand Parachutes. And they have done some really cool stuff with videos, including linking one video to another. One of their more recent videos. I forget the name of the song. It says at the end, like, hey, if you want to find out how this story started, go watch our other music video here and they actually tie in, even though they were released about six or seven months apart, they fit together.

And I think that is so incredibly important because that shows any D. I. Y. Artist can do that. You don't need a budget to figure out how to tie things together. Anybody can do that. It's important that you as an artist do because if you don't you'll be just another band who is doing a live video and there's nothing special that stands out about it. And one of the things that matt you have on this list, and I think it's really important and it ties into your storyboard is budgeting for props.

Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, of course. Whenever you watch the music video, there's all sorts of things that you're not focusing on, you're focusing on the band members, but there's all sorts of different things like you might need. We went on tour with an artist named Cleo cadence. Now she has a music video that if you go and watch it, there's props everywhere. She has like a branding that's a little bit more like I'm a queen type of branding. And so like in her music video, her first music video that she ever released, she had a snake that she wore around her neck and she had like a tiara and she had like a big thrown that she sat on and she had elegant regal clothing, just things that all kind of really tied in with the imagery of how she wanted to be branded and all those props.

They all cost money. There's lots of places you can rent perhaps that you can purchase, perhaps going to thrift stores and whatnot are all incredible things and great places to find like clothing props. It's also a good place if you need to destroy stuff for your music videos. Some music videos have like destruction and things like that. In a live in Barcelona's first video for Back to Life. We had a mirror that we got and we lit that mirror on fire for part of our music video.

We loved the imagery for it. We paid a couple bucks for it. All these things that you use in your video, like every single thing costs money. So really a lot of what we're talking about today is like kind of the budgeting for said video because props cost a lot of money, clothing costs a lot of money that is tied in as a prop. Each video is going to have a different type of prop. So some props are a little bit easier to budget for. Um sometimes it's like something simple, like going to goodwill buying something cheap.

Sometimes you need a very, very large prop like house little dickie has a absolutely classic video where he walks up to people's houses. Really expensive houses, rings their doorbell and says, hey I like, can I shoot a music video in your house? And he actually has that all filmed and you can watch him do that. He gets like a couple of people saying no, they don't want random people in his house. And then he gets to one lady who's like, yeah, sure why not. He literally put out a bunch of viral content all for next to nothing because he planned, he walked around to people with expensive looking homes, asked if he could make a music video and and told him he's like, yeah, everything's gonna be films.

And he signed contracts with these people to make sure that like if anything was damaged, he would pay for it. But essentially he budgeted and he found the cheapest possible way to make like the best quality content that he could. So when you set out, you know a lot of these details are going to come into the light. When you talk with your filmography for your videographer, after you get a treatment, you can kind of start to visualize how each individual scene is going to look. And then you can actually get with that director and talk with them and say like okay what kind of props are we going to need?

Then once you know what props you need then you can say okay now I can start budgeting for these things or you know I need a brand new this, I'm not going to get a brand new this from goodwill. So I have to go and buy this. And sometimes there's other things too, Like sometimes if you live in Washington state and you have somebody from florida coming to you to film a video, you might need things like lights. So even things that aren't necessarily in your video might inadvertently be something that you also have to budget for whenever you have people traveling to you for things that you're not going to have as much equipment as you would have at their home studio.

So that's something to think about. There's also lots of cool resource websites where you can go and rent a lot of things like lighting equipment or even cameras and, or lenses. There's actually some lens renting services out there where you can essentially rent to own. So you'll pay like $50, to rent a lens. They'll send it to you, you use it for however long and then you send it back. Well the lenses say $600, right? So after 10 rentals, they just say don't send it back. It's yours now. That's actually how we filmed all of our music videos is the guy who actually does the filming for us has a camera and he just rents different lenses and that's a part of our budget.

We have to account for that because that's an expensive of his pocket. And then it's also cool because the longer that we stay with him, the cheaper the music videos ended up getting because after we did so many music videos, he now owned more lenses. And so instead of us having to pay to rent a new lens, it was like, oh yeah, I know this $160 cheaper this time. And that's really awesome. Yeah. And he basically got the lenses for free because you covered the cost of each rental. Exactly.

And so it worked out great for everybody involved. And on top of that we supported this business that said this is our business model. You know, we rent out lenses, we want them to succeed because they're competing in that market, which makes our music videos cheaper. So money is a hard part. Don't sell yourself short. If you're trying to figure out really, really hard how to budget for X. Y and Z. Maybe take a step back from your project and say how can we maybe change the treatment to where we could do this a little easier.

I know I've mentioned blink 1 80 two's music video where they got a check from their label and said, You know, it's like $100,000 budget for music video. And they went and just took it to the bank, cashed it out and they on a really crappy camera, they made a video of them paying people money to do ridiculous things. Old ladies to shave their head, taking homeless people to get them an Armani suit, destroying cars, renting cranes, breaking stuff. All the things that they wanted to do in the video were very low cost manufacturing all the toys for the hell song was all very low cost, but they were able to like turn this low cost thing into essentially a high budget music video that did very, very, very well rube Goldberg machines.

I've seen some really awesome music videos with rube Goldberg machines, The bravery and honest mistake. Okay, go, okay, go. Yes, absolutely. So a rube Goldberg machine, you can essentially make with anything that you have around your house. It's literally it's domino's and it's basketballs and it's, you know, like however crazy you want to be able to make the physics puzzle you can and so like I've seen people do some absolutely incredible things. I had an idea a long time ago to make a war ask video, but the entire thing was going to be a food fight.

The image, you feel like you're down in the trenches and mud and shrapnel flying everywhere. But really it's like chunks of food and so you can blend these styles, you know, luckily for us, we have enough really, really, really bright minds out there, a good composer copies, but a great composer steals and so you can look at other people's ideas and say, hey, how could I basically take this idea and put it into like a different light or how could I have this cool new artistic spin And you do that by planning by budgeting for your props by making sure you have multiple different outfits, you rent your cameras and then you make sure that when all of you guys show up on scene, you guys know what you're doing.

That's the beauty of a story board with the storyboard. You literally have like, oh yeah, here it by eight seconds, this is gonna be the scene and then by 20 seconds, you know this is gonna be the scene and by 35 seconds this ideally is gonna be the scene. And when everybody is on the same page, whether that's you with your director, with the people who are helping you with your props or whatever or it's you and your band mates. When you guys are all on the same page, dude, you can crank these things out and on top of it, you end up with a product that all of you are just pumped about, you're like yes, we set out, we made this plan, we get to the end of it were within our budget, the scenes came out looking better than we expected and on top of that we didn't waste a bunch of times throughout the middle of the day.

Now some of the time, it's some of the planning will take a little bit longer if you're on big budget music videos, you're talking about getting like city permits that costs money and that takes time. So the earlier that you start your plan, the better off you're going to be, there is bureaucracy in every industry. And so when you're filming a music video, you're kind of bleeding over into a bunch of other industries. You know, you're like maybe renting props, maybe renting lenses, you know, getting a filmography for doing all these things going to different locations, you know, for, for zombies.

We filmed inside of bowling alleys, we filmed inside of movie theaters when we filmed inside of a bowling alley. Guess what we had to do. We had to pay to rent the lane. We couldn't just go in there, sit in film, we had to go pay to play a game and we filmed that. And then when we went to the movie theater, we weren't able to just go into a movie theater, especially not with a camera. We had to pay to go see a movie. So we went to this dollar theater or cheap theater and we paid money for like three people to go in.

We filmed the scenes that we needed to film and then we left. Those are all part of our operating expenses, their little expenses. But I mean you pay for three people to go into a cheap theater or whatever even though it's only $15. That adds up when you pay $15 for 10 different things. Now that's $150. $1,500 for the music video. Oh and here's $100 for your lens rental. Oh and maybe $200 for your light rental. Oh and then on top of that there is like the gas that it takes for you to travel between the different locations.

Then you're gonna have to pay your makeup guy. So compartmentalized everything, Break it all down individually, get a cost on everything, know how much things are going to cost, talk with your people and get commitments from people too. If you can get other businesses to commit to a certain amount of time and it's like, oh you need me for six hours with our make up guy. He went from location to location to location and he just kind of hung out in the van in between takes. So it worked out great.

He ended up making like $250 that day just for rolling around with us for us to shoot three different scenes, hiring a makeup person for each individual day. It would have cost like $150 a day. But because we got him to commit to hanging out with us for at least six hours that day. And so I was like, okay, we got this commitment, he came, he did his piece and you know what went perfectly, you know what went seamlessly? The makeup, the makeup went absolutely perfect. You know what we didn't plan well enough for was some of the locations that we wanted to go.

Initially, the first place that we went, it was a bowling alley and we asked permission and we're like, hey, can we just like film a couple minutes in here? And the guy said no. And we were like, well crap. I mean we had just driven there. So we just paid money, we're wasting time are make up. People were in the car, are paid, actors were in the car. Our music video director from Nashville was sitting in the car. We're all waiting there like waiting for us to essentially direct what's going to happen.

And we were like crap. We were not as prepared as we should have been. We were more prepared for that video than any other one, but that wasn't enough. So we ended up going to the next bowling alley and instead of asking permission, we just paid for games and films that we needed to and then left because we were so scared about them telling us know because it was our only other option. But in all actuality had I gone and talked to them earlier. They probably been like, yeah man, that's totally cool.

What's the name of your band? And then we would have had like four or five more fans and they would have told that story to their employees and been like, oh this music video was filmed in here because people actually nine times out of 10 thing. That's really cool. So you have good good conversations with people developing quality relationships with people. Listen to people, respect what other people have to say. We've used different locations for all of our music videos and we've had places where we've asked permission and it's been fine.

We've had places where we haven't asked permission and we've run into problems as with everything. Communication is key. But really having a plan and going through isolating every single part of that plan and making sure that you have dotted all of your I's and crossed all of your teas when it comes time to play a show. You don't want to be re stringing your instrument When it comes time to film. You don't want to be like asking what, what what am I supposed to do? You should know before you pay $1,500 for somebody to fly up from a different state to film your music video exactly what you're supposed to do.

If that means that you have to get a group chat, going with everybody in your band and your music director, then do that. Communication is key. And a lot of times plans don't go according to plan, but the planning is always invaluable. Yeah, agreed. And that's what makes pretty much anything. And the entertainment industry go down properly, is having a solid plan in place, knowing what comes next. This is something I can turn out about for hours being a former production manager and still on occasion if I get hired for a gig, but I don't advertise my services for that, but putting together the schedule and I don't know how it is for a music video.

But for example, for a show, you do what's called back scheduling and you say, okay, this is the curfew and you literally build, let's say the show has to be over at 10 30. You go backwards from there and say, okay, well the headliner plays from 9 15 to 10 30 so that means the opener plays for 45 minutes from 8 45 to 9. That way, there's a 15 minute change over or let's say that's the direct support and the opener plays 30 minutes from 7 30 to 8 and they also have a 15 minute change over. Okay, so if the show starts at 7 30 we should open the doors at seven, which means we have to finish up the sound check by 6 45 and then you keep going down that list, figuring out the opener, the direct support and the headliners sound check times and they're loading times and then you'll be like, okay, so we need the headliner to be there at one, the support to be there at 2 30 the opener to be there at 3 30.

And that way we get all our sound checks in with plenty of time to spare, they'll be done by 4 30 they can have dinner and then we don't have to worry about rushing to meet that 6 30 or 6 45. And time we'll have everything ready with the buffer. Absolutely. Even more than that too, because as soon as you make your schedule, you go and hand it off to the stage manager who then says, uh, okay, if this is when loading times are, then I need to know that these guys have to back line at this time and if we're gonna black line or not, everybody kind of has their own schedule that they're on.

And so the second kind of one of those pieces falls apart. You're talking about like this natural chain reaction effect where all of these other places, I mean every single person listening to this podcast at one point or another has played a show where things were running behind every single person has and you know what, when you're the headlining artist and you're like, doing it regularly every single night, and you get to a place and they're like, oh yeah, show is running behind like, headliners going on at 11, that's miserable to, like a touring headliner.

A lot of headlining artists will actually have in their writer that they, like, have to go on by like 10 pm or something like that. And a lot of the time it's because they're doing it every day and they don't want to be going to bed at midnight, they don't want to be going to bed at one o'clock in the morning there, tired, it's their day job, they want to go, they want to play, they want to like, take a few pictures, say good night, and then go back and get in their bunk and drive to the next city, because that's their day job.

And so when one facet of your plan starts to kind of like fall short, that has this domino effect. Some of the time, it's not very catastrophic and some of the times it can be like throw your entire day off this one time dude. As a matter of fact, it was for the zombies music video again, but it was for a different parts for our performance part, everything seemed like it was going so well. But there was an old theater that we filmed all of other our performance shots in And this old heater was like in this middle is a little one horse town and it's like 10 miles outside of a one horse town.

There's literally like the only things in this town was like this abandoned building, a couple houses and a bar just to put it into perspective. So we get out there and we're like, yeah, we're getting all set up and everything, and then we're looking around going, where's the base? Lo and behold, the bass guitar was not with us. And lo and behold we were two hours away from our house. And so it was like, great for starters, that was like some of the first stuff that we were filming for the video, and so it was like, super embarrassing that we paid this guy thousands of dollars to come here and film this music video for us, and we get out to cite one and we don't have an instrument that we're supposed to have.

It was like, what a rookie Unprofessional. Like just embarrassment that was, and the worst part was that this building was old and abandoned and we were filming in the middle of winter, and so it was like january were in this building that doesn't have any heat and we'll just like freezing. And then my guitarist wife is like, well yeah, I guess I'll drive it out to you. So it's like we had to sit there and basically wait for like two hours. We filmed a couple other scenes and whatnot.

Were able to luckily we worked with somebody who is good and he had a story board and he had a treatment and he had ideas. So he was like okay while we're waiting for that, we can film some of the other people's individual shots and whatnot. And so he made the best with what he had. But we dropped the ball. That's brutal. It was and it was an embarrassment to because like this is one of the largest music video like producers we had worked with, it was a good experience.

He flew up from Nashville, we wanted to make a good impression on him and then it was like, oh yeah, cool Day one. We did not come out with our best foot forward. Now granted oil got along really well and we've continued to do work with him. So he wasn't so off put by our unprofessionalism that he stopped working with us. But that's a very real possibility. James, how many times have you recorded an artist where you're like, this guitarist is not practiced too many times and do you want to keep tracking?

No, definitely not. I bet you instantly you're like, I don't want to track this guy anymore at all. One artist, I worked for a local artist Nine years ago now I redid 90% of the guitars on the ep for them. And that turned into a whole another mess because I talked to the singer who is the rhythm guitarist and said, Hey, like this is what needs to happen. Are you okay with this? And he promised to tell the lead guitarist and he didn't. Yeah, but he was the main point of contact for the project.

And that's why I was talking to him. I'm like, hey, this is your thing to deal with. But this is what needs to happen if you want it to be good. So that aside things happen and to me that shows communication, needs to be open and honest to go back to the show, production or production management side of things. My biggest pet peeve is artists who say, oh, can we just play one more song? It's like you're already two minutes over. You want to play one more song?

Yeah, you might be thinking that's only three minutes. But if the headliner is scheduled to end at 10:30 and 10:30 is the curfew, if we're five minutes behind, that's two songs less that that headliner gets to play. People aren't here to see your stupid local band, they're here to see the headliner. I shouldn't say stupid local band, but if somebody is asking to go over there, set time, that tells me they do not understand the industry, they might be great musicians, but they do not understand the business. And so that is one of my biggest pet peeves artists who do not respect the audience and do not respect the headliner.

There is a process in place and there is a reason for that. Absolutely. Actually have a firsthand experience of that. When we were on full us tour with red jumpsuit apparatus, we had a technical issue happen. And so that caused us to start a couple minutes late. Well, because that start with a couple minutes late, we just instantaneously cut a song. We were even saying let's let's cut to songs. So we cut two songs out and we were sitting there playing and then we got to what would have been like not our last song, but our second to last song.

And I was like, okay, we're gonna cut the second to last song. And my guitarist was like, well let's ask how much time we have. So we turn it, we said, hey sound guy, how much time do we have? Do we have time for two more songs? He said, oh yeah, totally. So we played our two more songs, finished up, walked up to the merch table and the tour manager from red jumpsuit walked up to me and said, hey, just so you know, you guys went two minutes over and I was like, oh man, I am so so sorry.

You know, like we asked the sound guy how much time we have left the tm for the whole tour also, then came up to us and said, hey, you guys can't be going over your time. Two minutes is what we went over and multiple people brought it to attention. And so for us, we defended ourselves and said, okay, like we're are 100% on board with that. However, if there's technical difficulties and the tour manager is not anywhere near within the vicinity of the sound guy or is not paying attention to the show being run, If we don't have enough time to play another song, then I need you there telling me that having this good dialogue with them, we both planned it worked out wonderfully.

We ended up cutting a song for the entire rest of the tour because we don't want to be those guys that were like, oh yeah, it's like if we're cutting it close to running over our set time, then let's just eliminate the song and then the next band has an extra four minutes to do change over. And from that day forward, the band that played after us was like, super. They were never mad at us before, but the fact that they just even had an extra five minutes to set up their stuff, they were like, that's really cool.

We were so concerned with going over and making a bad impression to these other guys and potentially hurting our reputation in the touring industry. We said, you know what? We'll just under play every day. Honestly, that worked out better because it was like, by the end of the tour, we had great relationships with almost every single person in every single band and our plan when we went into it was saying like, hey, you know, we're gonna do this, here's our set time, blah, blah, blah, this and then sometimes things don't go according to plan.

Sometimes it's like you misplace the laptop or sometimes a cable goes bad. Or sometimes you leave a guitar two hours away. If you break a string, like mid set, don't think that you are going to be playing your entire set unless you have a backup guitar that is all ready to rock and roll. In case that happens, the more you prepare, the higher level of competition you are prepared for. If you don't know the sizzle terms, if you don't have the back of guitars, if you don't have your stuff ready to rock and roll, you will fall by the wayside.

And this goes not just for music videos, not just for touring, not just for writing your music, but for everything, this is a life lesson. This is your reputation. If you say that you're going to do something, if you have a contract that says, you're going to do something, if you step into an industry where your requirements are doing something, if you want to be respected and treated as a professional in the industry, and then you put your best foot forward and you come in swinging man, when you come in swinging and there's like other professionals there, and you find them being like, yes, these guys are professional.

That right? There is like the feeling that Berm, you're just like, yes edification, verification. These are peers in my industry that are saying I'm doing things correctly, and the more that you do that, the higher the level of competition you get to, the more of those little tiny achievements you'll make, and after you've done it for so long, you'll realize that you're just a beast. Like you are everything that you're supposed to be in the music industry and that's a planner. That's a communicator. That's a hard worker.

Being diligent, prudent, keeping your tabs on the things. It's weird because it's not just one thing in the music industry that's like that if you're going on tour, you need to make sure that, like your tires aren't bald and that your brakes are nice. You have to be constantly planning and constantly looking at things in front of you. Do we have enough merch for this tour? Oh yeah, we're gonna go out on tour, but we don't have a device for making money. Like I've seen that before, I've seen headlining acts go out and they have won T shirt and I'm just like dude I do not understand this, I don't get it.

And so figure out what's important to you. Make a legit plan, work all the way through it, communicate well and if something is wrong, like talk about it, make a plan and do what you can to fix it. If you feel like you haven't given it your all, you know that you know at the end of the day you're like you can't convince yourself that you tried as hard as you could when you know that you didn't or when you didn't plan well enough. And so like make smart decisions.

But unfortunately the path to making smart decisions generally comes from making a lot of foolish decisions first, so learn, be humble, make mistakes, learn from them, but most importantly plan and communicate exactly. And I think one thing I want to add to that is think of any scenario that could be reasonably expected to happen for anything you're planning before it even happens. Have a plan for what to do. If it's something as simple as breaking a string, you have a backup guitar Tech issues, you cancel one song from your set, could be something bigger.

You get a flat tire, oh, we have triple A. But for everything that you've basically ever heard of, another D. I. Y. Artist facing have a plan for that. That's what they do in aviation. I'm wearing one of my nerdy aviation church today as matt can see but have a plan. So that way, when something happens, you're just like, oh cool, this is what we do now, problems solved. And then you hit the staples button and says that was easy and you're done. So just to recap the six things you didn't think about for your music video, our main overarching points where storyboards and treatments which go hand in hand with branding, budgeting for props, hiring actors and production staff renting equipment, the basic good practices of a music video shoot and your attire, your clothing.

A lot of things that people frequently overlook so matt, Thanks so much for putting that list together. I think this is going to be a super helpful episode for a lot of people who are getting ready to go out and shoot a music video or even just folks who are at some point in their career going to shoot a music video, which I hope will be everyone because you should be doing music videos. But on that note, I don't have anything else to add matt. How about you?

Actually, the one thing I would like to add is Darren Doane is a music video champion. Just look up Darren Doane, D O A and E is how his last name is spelled his discography or his filmography. The collection is absolutely amazing. And he actually has some videos on Youtube that talk about the mindset of filming a music video. I want to say. There's a couple of them that are each like a half hour to an hour long. But it's this visionary filmography for talking to artists about the right mindset to be in even just simple things like what emotions you should tap into and whatnot and just the right mindset that it takes for filming.

And those are really, really, incredibly powerful materials. So I would highly recommend everybody to take a look at Darren Don's catalog and watch his videos on Youtube. It's incredible material. And he talks about music videos in a philosophical way and really, in my opinion, taps into like the root of what that type of art is and what it's trying to accomplish. So watch those and watch them with your band mates if everybody's all on the same page, like it's really, really easy to eh, get fired up about something and be to work together to accomplish it awesome.

While Darren will be in our show notes at Bandhive dot rocks slash 90. That's the number 90 band. I've got rocks slash 90 as well as all the other artists and music videos. Anything like that we mentioned that will all be in our show notes. So, you can look up each single one of those videos we mentioned and look at what we're referring to. So, you get an understanding of what we're highlighting in each of these examples that we've given. So go check that out at band. I've got rocks slash nightly. Mhm.

Mhm mm. That does it for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening. I hope that the advice matt shared about music videos is helpful to you in your band and lets you make better music videos so you can promote your band more effectively. Now, speaking of promoting your band effectively, if you are interested in using a submit hub, we've just published a free email course about how you can optimize your, submit up submissions to get the maximum results for your song.

If you're interested in taking that free course, head on over to Bandhive dot rocks slash submit hub to get access, it's totally free. And if you have any questions about the course as you're going through, it, just hit reply to the emails and I will get back to you as soon as I can. So again, if you want to take part in that free email course, go to Bandhive dot rocks slash submit hub now to sign up aside from that, and we'll be back next Tuesday at six a.m.

Eastern time in your favorite podcast app. Until then, have an awesome week, Stay safe. And of course, as always, keep rockin.