My group was assigned the Country genre, which wasn't the most ideal beginning to this project. When we were listening to the songs, it was really difficult to visualize how we would make a music video, and more importantly, create an entire marketing plan for an artist with one of these songs as a crucial part of the process. When I thought that all hope was lost, I heard the opening keys and strings of "Need You Now" by Lady A, which is one of the few country songs that I love. As I heard the song, I knew that this song provided the most potential for this project, and succeeded at convincing my groupmates to choose this song as the basis for our project.
Since the song itself is sung by a male and female, we decided that our campaign would have to revolve around a duo of singers. When looking for names, we tried going for stereotypical Southern/Country items. A few names we thought could fit were "The Haymakers" and "Leviticus", but all of us weren't convinced with it, so we opted to go for something else. As we were throwing words around, I said "Only", and after a moment, we decided that it could be an acronym for the two singers' names. We realized that the name could be simple, it doesn't need to have an extensive meaning, but rather, it can be an easy name to remember and still somehow connect to the artists themselves. Luis mentioned the artist "SYML", with who I was familiar with, and since he had some commercial success, we knew that this type of name for our duo could work.
We had discussed some of the storyboarding ideas for the music video in class. We first came up with a general plot for the music video and then threw around some ideas for places where we could film it. When I went home that day, I got straight to making the storyboarding, which, for some reason, took a lot longer than I thought it would. I guess it's different when you're trying to tell a story and promote an artist and brand in three minutes. I'm not the best illustrator either so drawing out the scenes themselves took an immense amount of time. I can't even lie, after hearing the song for 4 hours straight while planning a music video for it, I am sick of it. However, when I did finish this exhausting process, I was proud of myself. For how impatient and unartistic I am, I was surprised that I finished it without having a meltdown.
The day after, we dedicated our class time to do more research about the recent trends in Country, as well as on developing our brand, logo, color scheme, and some merchandise. I found it difficult to come up with a logo at first, but I obviously wanted the letters to play a big part of it. So, after a 25-minute long Canva work session, we all agreed on the final logo.
