Music Marketing
Here is a collection of more music marketing work that I’ve done for independent artists, from idea to execution.
This work includes photography, videography and graphic design.
This is the release campaign I directed for a Sydney-based indie rock band, Bakura.
I served as the creative director for this campaign, working from idea to execution on marketing materials such as the cover art, photoshoot and music video.
You can listen to the song below, for reference:
“Champagne” Release Campaign
Campaign Breakdown
Concept
Champagne is an aspirational song of a band wanting to, one day, win the world over.
There were a few key concepts that I took away from the song, that I wanted to incorporate into the single cover:
Potential — the band is budding, but hasn’t bloomed. I thought that imagery relating to something in its infancy (or at its dawn) could be interesting. Like a small flame, or a sunrise.
Formlessness — We don’t know what this “future band” will be, or look like. It can only be imagined. Right now, it doesn’t take any clear form.
Isolation — All the band has, right now, is themselves. It’s them against the world. Depicting them in isolation (e.g. lots of negative space, or darkness) could help portray this idea.
Half-awake — The song (particularly its instrumentation) is a dreamy vision of the future. An element of surrealism could help conjure this feeling, visually.
Cover Art
With those concepts in mind, this is what I created for the single cover.
This was made by shining an orange light through the back of a translucent white backdrop, with a purple light shining down from the left side to create some foreground/background separation.
The “foggy” look was the result of spraying a can of “atmosphere” in the room, as well as smearing some vaseline around the edges of the lens (using glad wrap as a layer of protection for the lens, of course).
Some post-processing was used to emphasise the depth of the fog, such as at the bottom of the image.
“Intros” Photoshoot
As this was the band’s debut release, and they had no existing social media presence at the time, we decided to do a portrait shoot to introduce each member of the band.
The idea was that the people who would come into Bakura’s account would be able to scroll through the backlog and see the band’s “story so far”.
Music Video
I followed the band around with my camera for about 6 months to gather footage, going to their studio sessions, rehearsals, and gigs.
As this was the debut single, we wanted to show the personalities of each member, and show the audience their little slice of the world.
You can watch the video here.