Video is one of the most effective tools you have to market your music and music videos are still one of the best ways to showcase your songs. But can you make good music videos that don’t cost a lot of money? Prescription PR have created a list of 10 tips for making music videos on a budget. I’ve added my own thoughts and personal experiences on the topic to help you along.
It’s All About The Concept
Don’t just think about videoing yourself miming to a playback, have an strong and interesting concept that people will will watch and say ‘wow, I really have to tell someone about this’. Go WTF if you need to!
The video for Praise You broke the mould in the 90s by only costing $800 to make. A great example of a ‘wow’ lo-fi video.
Go Lo-FI
If you execute it well, filming on a smartphone is fine these days. See our other blog post on that here. I filmed this video on my smartphone for no money, 60,000 views and counting!
Do a lyric video
If you can’t afford to hire someone for a shoot or you haven’t got the skills, use something like iMovie to give a song a video.
You can use iMovie to create a lyric video for a song.
Record a live/acoustic performance
It can be real easy (and cheap!) to record an acoustic/stripped down version of any song using a simple camera or smartphone setup.
A simple set up like this works wonders for singer/songwriters and can be used again and again.
Ask a favour
You might know a semi-pro photographer/keen camera enthusiast. See if they can help with filming.
Ask a friend who has a keen interest in photograpy if they can help out with your filming.
Buy Your Own DSLR
My band bought a reconditioned DSLR from eBay for about £350 and we’re still using it to this day for a lot of our videos. For the cost we’d have paid to one videographer for one video shoot/edit we can do all our videos ourselves if we want to! It’s an investment.
Buy your own DLSR for band filming, I did.
Invest in Some Inexpensive Lighting
It’ll help if your videos are well lit, and lighting doesn’t have to be expensive. You can even buy non photograhy LED lighting panels from your local hardware store!
LED lighting is cheaper than you think.
Think About Your Locations
Try and film in as few places as possible as you’ll waste time moving from place to place (and time is money!). Reuse the same location for different shots. Most of the locations for this video are based in or around a local park, with minimum travelling required.
Use A Green Screen
I used a green screen in my kitchen for this video. All video editing packages have green screen facilities built in these days.
Use Post Production
For a more polished look, at the editing stage, make sure all your shots are appropriately colour balanced, have correct brightness/contrast etc. This is easy to do in most video packages.
Use your post pproduction facilities in your editing NLE package for a more polished feel.
Read the article in full here
Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?
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