How best to arrange collabs with musicians and video makers?

Projects The Indie Beat Radio
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Our launch of https://tv.theindiebeat.fm went fantastically yesterday.

We’ve gotten a number of questions about the best way to hook up willing video makers with musical artists for collaborations. This is a good thing! But we don’t have a great answer and hoping some of you can suggest a solution.

What is the right space or mechanism to help these people find one another? Does such a space exist already? Should there be a project HERE that focuses on hooking up those people? Or does that deviate from the mission of this discourse (being musician focused)?

Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions … maybe just a thread here that we can point to will help people find each other!

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I really don’t want to sound all negative but in my experience, there are no movie makers interested in collaborating with musicians. Like in: None at all.

I have, for each of my albums as “Schall und Stille”, tried to find someone on the fedi to collaborate on a video, for several years now.

Each and every time it’s been either crickets or a discouraging disaster.

For the first two albums / EPs, simply no one answered (I eventually slapped something together for the second album on my own. It was quite shitty and not as good as it should have been, but hey at least it was fun to do).

The discouraging disaster happened when I was about to release my 3rd production “Malers Hüs” last year; once again precious little answers on the fedi and then finally I was contacted by a teacher who was sympathetic to my cause and had set herself the task of convincing her class to do a video for me. We wrote a lot and got along really good and things got very encouraging. The poor woman was totally committed and motivated and in love with both my songs and with the idea of her class doing the vid, and thought it really would happen and sat down with her class to listen to the songs in consideration, and yeah well long story short the class was totally disappointed that I was some nobody who didn’t do hiphop and r&b and that was that. In the end, everyone was pissed. I was pissed because I had put quite a bit of hope and effort into this, the teacher was pissed because her class had turned out to be a bunch of little morons, and her class was pissed because I wasn’t Jay-Z.

Because fool me four times shame on you, fool me five or more times shame on me I tried again this year with my “offline” album. Again, the days went by, no takers. Finally, some gaming dude says maybe he would want to do something but of course after I sent the tracks over the thing quickly fell apart and he was never heard from again.

So, in summary: I have the feeling that if there are audio/video people on free channels such as the fedi, they have no interest whatsoever in collaborating. I also don’t think it’s got anything to do with my music or the music on alternative channels being “alternative”, because the stuff I do is very nearly pop music much of the time. It’s simply that open and free channels are not the place where video people hang out. That’s also what I’ve been given to understand in private conversations with people who know film people, or comments like this one: https://hub.kliklak.net/item/e855e525-d206-482f-9da8-54f1eda953d1

If someone has different experiences, I’d positively love to be proven wrong.

Kind regards
Stephan

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I tried to give away some of my visual effects techniques for processed imagery, but found no takers way back in the day (2010). These techniques are still available and could be reworked into Blender and other tools. I too was greeted by crickets.

I would love to collaborate - but my time is limited just now with trying to solo run and manage our small packaging brewery in NZ. That having been said - any of my royalty free footage and associated techniques are free to anyone wishing to use them. I might be able to get an older installation of Cinema4D going again and re-render to higher resolutions if wanted as these were all created before HD (SD PAL and NTSC).

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Thank you so much for making your effects and footage available, that’s really great of you!! :heart:

However, when I speak of “collaboration” I’m really thinking more along the lines of “I provide awesome music, you provide an awesome film == instant, universal cross-discipline awesomeness” :wink:

That’s the idea at least. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen.

(this is not meant to belittle your contribution. I can only speak for myself here until somebody else chimes in… but I think many of us are simply first and foremost musicians and not versed in the art of film making)

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I am truly sorry those bad collabs keep happening to you. I have had some great interactions tho, so it is possible!

During the launch and a couple of times after we actually had one or two video makers reach out and ask how they can connect with artists who need videos – this is driving the question.

Sounds like, so far, there is not an established forum where these people can come together and find one another. It also sounds like there are some watch-outs and strong communication is needed from the outset between the collaborators to make sure nobody gets burned.

Does anyone else have positive experiences other than me? Care you share how you managed it? How you met up?

And in general what would be a good way to connect these people who do want to collab on music videos?

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I’ve noticed one of the interesting examples for providing visuals is used in Forest Swords Crow vid that essentially is a 3D visualizer with minimal camera movement and few cuts but looks sophisticated and alluring. Of course building a model like that takes a lot of time and energy but if you already built a model in your architecture/engineering study or whatever, it should not require a lot of effort to cut it to the beat. I guess what I’m trying to say that there are different ways to approach video making, it does not always have to be intense.

Love this topic.

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Thanks for sharing your story. I relate. Especially about the “your music doesn’t have a beat” thing. Many years ago and again during the lockdowns for COVID, I looked for collaborators.

The only video/music collaborations that worked are ones where the video was created first and I added music (usually improvisations since that’s my forte). Unfortunately, since my brief work with a wonderful artist (who eventually gave up art for her day job) in about 2004-5, I have been unable to find a collaboration that worked for everyone involved.

Though my music videos may not ever make it to MTV (oops, that’s gone too) or similar, I enjoy making them and they gain some listeners, so I’m happy to keep forging ahead.

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10 years ago i remember being blown away by some of the videos made for/by The Creators Project but that was something backed up by big companies with big money.
I guess the bottom line sometimes is money ? if the artist doesn’t have any money to back the project, it’s difficult to do anything.

I’ve made music clip for people back in the day, i was interested in animation, fan MVs too, but i was a young student with lots of time, energy and passion, things are different now :sob: