- John Scott
The Music Video Never Went Away
It shouldn't surprise you to consider that just about everything in our world has been disrupted, improved upon, or upgraded. Sometimes the evolution of things and ideas is a product of technological advancement. Sometimes it's cosmetic. The iron is still is a piece of metal heated by electricity. Bread gets toasted pretty much the same way it has for generations.
I used to do a weekly cable show that ran on MTV. The host and I did calendar items, upcoming concerts, stuff like that
It was quite a logistical effort. A massive amount of equipment and crew was needed to not only shoot our segments and the network videos that played around us.
camera crew
light crew
sound crew
the director
grips
gaffers
assistant producers
The music video in 2017-18 is still a very big deal.
Taylor Swift and Katy Perry each have two videos that have two billion views, while Justin Bieber, Enrique Iglesias, Maroon 5, Adele and others have hit the one billion mark.
Our kids use YouTube as their radio station. Mobile video matters.
A couple of years ago my friend Shannon from the epic San Francisco band The Stone Foxes asked if I would appear in his band's video.
This was shot (basically) with a couple of cameras, and two lights on poles. The modern video is now "created" in post production, using editors like Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple's Final Cut Pro X.
The lighting can be corrected after the shoot, the filters applied later. The color correction can be put off until whenever. While post-production of video was obviously done back in MTV's video golden age, the tools now are so powerful one need only shoot reasonably okay raw footage. The software can perfect it later.
Unless one is doing a mega-star production, there are no more big trucks full of gear on site, no more legions of crew members milling around. At one point during the shoot director David Dutton set a Canon DSLR camera on a bar stool, pointed it at me and two other people sitting on a couch, and said "Action."
We did our thing.
The modern challenges are the same as before: creating the story, editing/producing it then distributing it. The cable TV model is not totally obsolete, but it's not how most people see them anymore.
To advance dad's impala as a brand and to introduce ourselves to our desired audience and people who will want to book us for gigs, we'll need a good video product to accomplish that.
Time is the enemy for any band for members with day jobs and kids.. Kids vacuum up weeknights, weekends, always.
But we'll get it done, and it'll be good, and it will be thoroughly modern. We look forward to showing you our stuff.