Creative Constraints: Making Memorable Music Videos on a Budget
Pro tip #1: Don't skimp on the snacks
There’s a lot of pressure on indie bands to do the same sorts of things their bigger, more successful cousins do. Like: music videos. Even though bigger bands have external budgets, production and promotion teams to work with, there’s a tacit expectation on smaller bands to have their own video accompaniments to their music. Why is this? After all, there are a few things that can generally be said about bands at our level with regards to filming music videos:
We don’t have any money.
We spend all the money we do make on band-related expenses.
Music videos are expensive to make and (usually) don’t help you make money.
Seems like a pretty cut and dry case, right? Don’t make music videos. Nobody’s got a gun to our heads about it.
But…
I believe it was Madonna, the presumed inventor of the format, who said that
Music videos are cool and good.
-Madonna
And who are we to argue with The Queen?
But for real: a well-made video projects seriousness about your project and helps to round out your stable of assets. Before trying to make a few, I wasn’t convinced of their utility, but I’ve come around. And after hearing positive feedback from industry personnel we’ve dealt with that our videos are a strong part of our overall catalogue, I’m glad we’ve put in the effort and I’m proud of our slowly growing video presence.
I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret! We’ve managed to throw together all our videos on pretty tight budgets. I won’t share exact figures out of respect for our collaborators, since they honestly deserve to be paid more and I hope future bands who work with them, perhaps higher on the food-chain than us, are able to pay them more.
But even without getting into the nitty-gritty of dollars and cents, I think there are some things we’ve learned through the process of putting together a few of these things that might be of some value to other creators looking to make videos of their own.
(And who knows, maybe in a year or two AI tools will be advanced enough that this whole conversation is moot, and we can just crank these things out with a few prompts. But in the meantime…)
Lesson 1 - The idea’s the idea (until it ain’t)
You can’t make a video until you have a concept, right? Well, maybe that isn’t always true. But usually it’s a good idea to brainstorm something before you start shooting.
This can be one of the hardest parts of the whole process! Four (or more) people sitting around a table, throwing ideas out—all the usual pitfalls of group creation are at play. Maybe you get married to an idea that someone else hates (or vice versa). Maybe your idea makes sense on paper but isn’t practical in reality.
Fortunately, the director of our last two videos, Bruno, came pre-loaded with a bunch of ideas. And we’re generally pretty happy to let other creators we work with do their thing, not being the types to enforce our will creatively in collaborative projects.
Even with those relatively smooth trade winds at our back, there were still some hiccups at the ideas stage, most of which can be attributed to what I’ll call:
Not letting the ideas do the work for themselves.
As with our music, we’re pretty big adherents to the first-thought-best-thought school. So when we found ourselves fighting against reason, practicality, or just good old fashioned gut feeling to make an idea seem workable, it was time to ditch it and pivot.
In the case of “Undecider,” that happened pretty late in the game. We had already settled on (what we thought was) a solid idea, and yet we threw it out at nearly the last minute in favour of something that seemed more immediate and doable.
The idea’s the idea, until something else becomes the idea. You’ll know it when you see (feel, hear) it.
Lesson 2 - Whatever you have: invest it in people
Your budget’s small, and stuff is expensive. People, too, usually like to be paid. Classic rock and hard place scenario!
We’ve found that the actual stuff you need to make interesting work is pretty limited. Granted, some of the people we were working with came equipped with their own pretty heady gear; but even still, we like to think that not all of this stuff was necessary to the end result, merely helpful.
(Anthony, our DOP on “New Whip” and “Undecider,” is laughing maniacally somewhere at this statement.)
Almost all of the cost of all our videos so far have gone into working with the various people who helped make it happen (and keeping them fed and watered).
People make the magic happen. The rest, like props, lights, gear, even venue rental, is just seasoning, and can be worked around creatively or substituted with free or nearly free alternatives.
Lesson 3 - Location, location, location
When you’re working on a budget, make sure your location is doing as much work as possible for you.
A lot of times, big budget video productions will choose a location not for its own particularly strengths, but because of how adaptable it is. That’s why so much stuff is shot in Vancouver: it can be made to look like almost anywhere.
The opposite is true when your budget is small. Your location should be the stage, yes, but it should also be a character in your video.
For “Undecider,” we were fortunate enough to use Vancouver’s quirky old Rio Theatre. This old girl has a ton of charm, and we were able to easily accommodate a bunch of different settings and shoots in a single day of shooting.
From its iconic stage to a drafty attic to a basement utility space (affectionately known by the people who work there as “The Dungeon”), the charms of the location itself find themselves into each frame and work together to cohere the finished product.
Author’s Note: It didn’t feel right to compile notes about the video project without hearing from the project’s mastermind himself. I asked Bruno to contribute a hard-won lesson of his own, and lucky for us, he had some absolute pearls to share:
Bruno writes…
Lesson 4: It never goes according to plan
Working in film as a director/editor for as long as I have, one thing you can count on happening, regardless of budget, production, or people involved, is that things will not go according to plan. A big part of being a filmmaker is being able to be versatile when those problems arise. Here are a few things I think about and prepare myself for before any shoot:
I try and shoot my projects with raw or S-log gamma curves that can give me a lot of wiggle room in the editing room. I almost always aim to shoot S-Log3 or Raw on whatever cameras we’re using for the project. This usually also includes B-Cam, although, in the case of “Undecider,” we used a B Cam that had S-Log 2, and we also used an iPhone for some shots that were heavily stylized, so every rule is made to be broken. 😛
Shooting 4k is almost always a good idea, even if you’re posting your stuff on YouTube (which doesn’t currently support 4k for most users). The ability to scale up your images almost 4x is very handy, especially if you need to zoom in or out of a frame where crew or gear are in view, or for other late-stage creative decision making (zoom tightness, view angles, proximity-switching, etc.). Having more footage to work with gives you more options.
Another great thing is that if you’re not clear on what aspect ratio you’re going with, shooting 4k can be super helpful. Usually when I’m starting a music video project, I’m not sure if I want the finished product to be full frame 16x9, an anamorphic/cinematic look at 2.39, or a tight and vintage 1:1 or 4:3 look. For the first video I did with Aversions, “New Whip,” I was thinking throughout that I wanted it to be a cinematic (2.39) look, but once I started editing the opening shot and cut the first camera fly-in, I had the thought to transition the aspect ratio mid-shot. This thematically mirrored the protaganist’s shift from a happy, open person to the narrow view of the world that suffocates her for the rest of the video.
Seconding what Sammy is saying about working with the right people—it really helps to work with a good, collaborative crew of friends on set. Things go wrong, you might have a midday panic attack, but having support and like-minded people with good ideas around you provides an invaluable safety net.
The night before the shoot in the Rio’s “dungeon,” there was a leak and the room we were going to shoot in the next day was completely flooded with water. So, it’s 11pm and Tony (the DP) and Warren (a producer) and I prepared plans B, C and D in case we weren’t going to be able to shoot there the next day. Luckily the Rio gang are fantastic at their jobs and were able to control the situation through the night and by the time we arrived the next day at 7am the issue was completely dealt with. 🎉
Lesson 5 - Planning and execution of the video is only half the battle
And arguably the less important half.
The video we did last summer for our latest album’s lead single, “New Whip,” has now been officially selected in five different film festivals worldwide, including a runner-up placing at the Prague Video Awards.
As of the writing of this article, it has 589 views on YouTube.
Obviously, we would like this number to be much higher. The amount of effort put into even a one or two-day film shoot is considerable, and you want that work to be rewarded.
Just because you build it does not mean they will come. For our latest effort we have a more robust plan in place: small targeted ad buys on key platforms and plans to build and maintain a sustainable word-of-mouth campaign.
It’s by no means a guaranteed path to a meaningful audience, but some plan is better than no plan, and last time…we had no plan. Don’t be us!
Lesson 6 - Future You will thank you for trying
I’ll end on this one, because I think it segues nicely from the last point. Look: it’s tough out there for content creators. You’re always swimming upstream against all the other shit that gets poured onto the internet daily.
Sometimes you need to step back and assess your work on its own merits. I’m already appreciative of the work we did in 2021 for “Famous Last Lines” and again that year for “Sharp Left Turns.”
Those videos, like the new ones (yet), don’t have a tonne of views. But I’m proud to show them to people, and I know if they look us up online that they’re seeing something of value.
I’m really glad that we took steps to put out quality work then. And I’m equally glad now, knowing that the me in 2030 looking back will feel the same.
Sometimes you really just do have to do things to please yourself, and hope it’s catching.
That’s a wrap! 🎬
Art is subjective and there’s no one denotation of “quality,” so you need to figure out for yourself what constitutes a successful video project. Maybe you can achieve everything you want from shooting around your neighbourhood with your iPhone. And certainly, there’s no direct relationship between the amount of time, effort, and person-power put in to the “results” (views, conversions, whatever) you get back.
But I encourage creators to push themselves: find people you trust and respect to work with, and do the best thing you’re capable of in the moment. Leave yourself open to being surprised by what you come up with.
At the end of the day, the thing that shines through in creative work more than anything is intent. The more of yourself you put into the result, the brighter the shine.
If you’re interested in working with or learning more about Bruno Trivelli, visit his website: Death XIII.
You can learn more about Anthony de Weerdt’s projects over on his IMDB page.