By : Ever aka Agent Emerson
For those of you who are a very observant, you may have noticed that all of the blogs posted to date have had the name of a song as the title. If you hadn’t realized that… well now you know why the blogs titles seemed a little strange. This is your oooooooooh-aaaaaaah moment. But for this blog I decided to go a little more straightforward.
Now some of you might know what DIY means & some of you may not. DIY stands for Do It Yourself. This is something that applies to pretty much any facet of your life or work you want to do. It applies to us in that we handle pretty much every part of our band & promotion. We book our own shows, we design our own merch/flyers/websites & album artwork, we produce our own music & found our own distribution, we build our own stage props, we hit the streets to promote our band ourselves, etc. etc. We do this for 2 reasons. First, because we want to have creative control over everything that we do & not get screwed over by anyone. Second, because we’re not signed & don’t have the funds to have anyone to do everything for us. But even then, we have had offers to sign with indie labels. Unfortunately we noticed that the “deals” we were getting pretty much still had us doing everything, so we’ve just stuck to handling it ourselves. This means delaying things like recording new music, new merch & videos. But when you have the DIY ethic, you MAKE IT WORK. We’re definitely not the first or the last band to handle all aspects for themselves, but we’re just posting this blog to give you a little insight as to how things go down behind the scenes.
The focus of this specific post is the music video for our song “Hush Hush”, off of our 2008 release “Escuchame.” One of the most important things you need for promotion when you release an album is a music video. Even though there isn’t many music channels left playing actual videos, they are still extremely relevant & can help boost the sales of your album. Now when we decided to shoot our video we had a ton of ideas for it. But with a DIY budget of about $100 (LITERALLY) we had to figure out the best way to streeeeeeetch our dollars. We came up with a concept, begged our 2 friends Victor DeAnda & Bryce Duncan who had some camera equipment to help us shoot it, bought our “supplies” & rigged up a set in our rehearsal studio. If it wasn’t for us building & setting up our props, having a great post-production artist (that happens to be in our band) & having awesome friends that were super helpful, the result wouldn’t have come close to what we actually got. Anyone can string a few clips together for a music video & throw it up on YouTube, but to have something that you can have played on an actual music channel is difficult. Luckily for us, we achieved that!
So take a look at some behind the scenes pictures from our video shoot, and check out how with some magic (and plenty of DIY effort) we got to the official music video for “Hush Hush”
