For researching for creating my music video, I watched many music videos by indie artists, like the music video for Can I Call You Tonight? by Dayglow and beabadoobee's music video for Glue Song. From these, I noticed that instead of chasing a high quality of production, indie rock music videos embrace an almost unprofessional style. In Can I Call You Tonight?, the director mainly does this by creating a DIY film aesthetic with the use of an old camcorder as the camera instead of a modern DSLR camera which is present in pop music videos. This inspired me to embrace what others would call a "bad camera" with some shots of Flower being shot with a Nintendo 2DS. In Glue Song, I noticed that Jack Erland and Bea used oversaturated shots to create a sense of nostalgia, as old film cameras have an oversaturated sheen. I implemented this with the contrasting shots filmed on my phone compared to the often overexposed or underexposed shots on my 2DS. As it doesn't have any way to manually focus, this allowed the brightness of those films to vary, which will highlight the phone shots. A large majority of shots were filmed with handheld, which adds to the DIY aesthetic. I embraced this by filming most of my shots handheld. Both of these music videos aren't trying to project a message. Instead, they just focus on showcasing the artist in the best way possible, like the music video for Can I Call You Tonight? showing Dayglow being quirky and weird, which inspired me to include shots of Jack being quirky with playing a very tiny guitar, and Glue Song focuses on showcasing the artist beabadoobee, which I incorporated by having Jack be the only person in the Flower music video. With the digipak, I was inspired by several rock album digipaks, like Radiohead's Kid A and The Strokes The New Abnormal. Here, I noticed that the use of inserts were important, as they could showcase aspects of the artist. I embraced this by having my inserts showcase the quirky aspect of Jack, with a poster of a banana being bitten into. With the social media, I noticed how artists like Radiohead and Laufey play into memes, with Laufey making her own memes. Her creating her own promotion creates a tighter connection with her audience, which I embrace with having Jack record some videos for himself which I edited for the social media.
 |
| Phone camera compared to 2DS camera. |
My target audience for viewers of the Flower music video by The Jack Project, and more generally Jack are people of all genders aged between 14 to 21. These viewers would be more active online compared to their peers. The audience would also be interested in other indie rock artists, and rock musicians in general. Other indie rock artists have a similar target audience, as this allows their fans to be almost obsessive towards the artist, which allows the artist to benefit by spending more on the artist's merchandise and willing to spend more for concert tickets. For engaging this audience, I focused on the social media aspect. Gen Z mainly uses social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. Since my audience is Gen Z, I decided to choose my platform to be Instagram, as choosing a platform like X/Twitter wouldn't have as much Gen Z-ers for me to reach. I considered using TikTok, but it relied too much on video content instead of pictoral content, which Instagram supports better. On Instagram, I would post between a mix of "traditional" marketing with teasers of release dates, and memes which include my song. Memes often engage Gen Z the most, so I decided to incorporate that into my social media. All of the social media posts have multiple hashtags in the description, which allow for other people to more easily find The Jack Project. "Traditional" marketing often engages older audiences and aren't as effective with the younger audience I have, so I decided to lean onto creating memes, where Jack's song Flower is the focus, such as a video that plays a clip from the "TikTok Rizz Party" with Flower playing in the background, captioned something along the lines of "omg guys my hit song Flower is playing at the Rizz Party! make sure to stream it on 4/10!". I made it seem like Jack himself was posting this himself, which shows that he is very up to date with current memes. By posting current popular memes, the popularity of this will allow some viewers of the "Rizz Party" to flow to The Jack Project's memes on the "Rizz Party". Branding was kept consistent, as the font for the traditional marketing is consistent with the fonts on the digipak and with the music video. Jack's brand was made to show him being funny and a little quirky, with the music video showing him playing what some could call the worlds smallest guitar, the digipak having a weird insert of a poster of a banana bitten into (including the skin), and the Instagram page showing Jack be funny with videos of him playing into current trends online like creating "the song of the summer" and "crazy how no one knows that i'm an X who Y". I also engaged my audience by having multiple versions of Flower and One (the other song Jack is currently making) on the digipak. Having different versions, like a sped up or demo allows for a greater amount of streams, as the target audience of Gen Z currently fuels the sped up/slowed down songs trend, so playing into this would give The Jack Project slightly more success. I would argue that the brand was well developed, but it could be better established with the social media showing a variety of memes, instead of relying on the "Rizz Party", which could become irrelevant right before Flower releases, which would be problematic because I have done the Instagram equivalent of putting all my eggs in one basket.
 |
| The "Rizz Party" being incorporated into my social media promotion. |
My music video doesn't represent social groups in the normal way, but it does represent some issues, like teenage romance, and the large group of teens involved with romance. This is clear through the lyrics of Flower, where Jack uses the prick of a flower as a symbol for getting hurt in a relationship. I show off this with the music video often having scenes that look distorted. These ramp up in intensity during the bridge, which shows that Jack is being hurt emotionally. The music video doesn't play into current stereotypes of Jack's age group, Gen Z. Sure, it does showcase Jack playing "teen angsty" instruments like the drums and guitar, but he doesn't do them very loudly, like other music videos showcasing a teen musician would. This also develops Jack's brand that he is chill. Looking back, I think that playing more into Hispanic representation wouldn't really work well for this piece. Originally, I was a bit worried that I didn't incorporate representation. But if I did focus on Hispanic representation, it could take away a large amount away from the main subject being romance.
