Basically Music Videos – “Crave You”

This is the first entry in a new weekly blog post (we’ll see)about inexpensive music videos. As a music video director/producer just starting out, I’m constantly put in a position in which someone wants a great music video but they don’t have much of a budget. People tend not to grasp the concept that most great music videos cost a lot of money and rightly so. That mansion, those outfits, all those background dancers, the hot cars, and fireworks are pretty costly. The problem is that when you start out, most of the time you won’t have a lot of clients/artists that have the money to afford projects like that – but they’ll want something just as cool. Also, to develop a career you’ll need a portfolio that’s awesome and its hard to do that with limited funds. The result of all these low budget endeavors is either an uninteresting/unoriginal video or something that just looks low budget. However, if you’re a true artist (I guess) and really creative, you can come up with an idea for a video that doesn’t require a lot of money but will still have an impact.

The purpose of these blog posts is to celebrate and get more exposure for videos that deserve credit for being so original, to give inspiration to myself and other producer/directors, to give me something to write about, and honestly to help with SEO for my company. The music videos will be sometimes very famous, sometimes old, sometimes not very famous at all (but probably viral, otherwise how would I know about them). I’m going to try to pick videos that also don’t require immense amounts of time – because often we don’t have that either. At the onset I’ll also put down a projected budget. Probably not the actual budget, but something that will make some sense. And here we go.

This video is of note for a bunch of reasons. One, it was the inspiration for these blog posts. Although I had become more interested in low budget music videos for my own reasons, it wasn’t until I watched this one and had a reaction to it that I thought I should actually write about them (to all of our detriment). Two, according to Uproxx.com (the site I originally saw this on) this is a dubstep song. This would be huge since if you know me, I hate dubstep (although, I’ve conceded that I could easily see it evolving into a music genre that I would one day like) – which makes me think its not dubstep because I actually like it. Three, its a perfect example of what I want to show people in these posts. As far as I can tell, you could budget this thing out for $0. Originally, I was going to say that it would cost you the price of the wood, but that wood doesn’t even look new, I think they might have just found it somewhere (resourceful). The tap dancers need tap dancing shoes, but I’m guessing they have their own and it doesn’t seem like they broke the bank on wardrobe. In theory, the shooting locations are free – but they may have bought permits like upstanding citizens of the United States of America (“lame”).

The idea is both simple and clever (see, its more easy being clever than you thought) – two guys tap dancing on the beach. Boom, done, handled! The execution is where it gets somewhat tricky. There’s a fair amount of camera movement which isn’t impossible or even remotely original, however, a lot of first time directors forget what a good idea this is for music videos. The shot selection is solid but not out of this world inventive. They correctly did a good job of shooting the feet tapping which is really the main idea of the video. The editing is done with skill. I doubt this is the first music video the editor has put together, but if it is – I think he/she has a nice career ahead of them (especially with this video already having a pretty decent amount of hits on youtube). Although it seems like they shot all the beach stuff in one day, I’m not so sure. Possibly, if they really had their shit together they could handle all that in a day. But the thing is, the lightning never changes which means they don’t have a day to shoot that, more like an hour. Unless that’s just how the sky looks there – not sure if that’s possible. This may be what prompts the change of venue for the end of the music video which I thought was unnecessary along with the visual effects. The cleverness lies in two guys tap dancing at the beach, which isn’t there anymore once you remove the beach. The visual effects are simple and have an impact, but they seem somewhat tacked on. However, criticism like that is just art school bullshit that really shouldn’t diminish your view of the video. For a project like this, they don’t seem to have the money to make any decision they want based on unlimited resources and have to make lemonade out of lemons. Which they effectively did.

As far as the audio mix itself, I’m not totally sure what the deal is. Did they actually tap along to a beat that sounded like tap dancing already? Did they record the audio of the tap dancing at the beach to put in the song (doubtful because you’d hear other beach sounds – unless someone mastered them out)? Did they record the audio of the tap dancing choreography somewhere else to mix in? They already use some of the beach sounds earlier which gives this piece more of a sense that the audio/music is coming from the music video environment instead of just prerecorded music. You don’t tend to see this in most music videos which makes me like it.

As a young music vidoer (not a word) you should use this to set the bar. This is something that you could have done yourself (then you’d have those youtube hits) Your ideas for music videos should be this good. If they’re not, then come up with new ones. There are no excuses when videos like this exist. You aren’t limited by budget, only your ability to shoot and edit – which is on you. In conclusion, great job anonymous music video production team (next time, try to get them to give you a shout out on youtube so I can properly salute you).

If you have any suggestions for music videos I should put on here, let me know. dr.jeff@revolutionary-productions.com