An Indie Musician's Diary VOL. 1

Making Indie Music Videos Inexpensively

Less is more! Keep it simple and powerful and build up your film according to or reflecting the various parts and the arrangement of your song. Do you have a build up or a climax in the song? Let something surprise the viewer right there. Timing is everything, so clip well.

There are some ways around traditional music video creation. Here are some cool things I've come across. You have to know when to use them and when not to. See what other people in your niche are doing and see if you can do something similar but better than they. 

Creative Audio Visualisation - Here are some tips 

Sometimes you just want a bubble to pop in time to your latest rap or dance track. See these videos on how to create a logo and audio visualisation music videos in an Android system with two apps: 

I haven't tried this but it is cool, gotta admit. I guess this fits for Hiphop, EMD, House, Beats, Dance etc. 

Online Music video services:

You can take your clips and upload them to various services and out comes a film. Sounds great? I dunno. You decide. Here are a few to look at.

Rotor 

Rotor is an online video editor for the guy who just wants some random pics to fly by in a cool way as you serve your music to the world. 

Just like you can master your tracks through a robot service, you can create a music video by dragging clips and film files into Rotor's robot editor online. It is an alternative to buying Premier or some other expensive editing software. You upload your songs, clips and film files and then let it edit for you, in the cloud. Then you pay when you are satisfied and download your song, paying per track with Rotorvideo.com (see video in the header up on top). Only download the highest quality. That will cost you $30 per track but it is true that most musicians get noticed through YouTube music videos, so don't spare your money on this. You can do your music video in Rotor if you don't have the opportunity or time to make your music videos professionally. 

I am not endorsing them. I am just saying that this seems good if you aren't a wiz at making a music video. I tried it and it seems hard to get the editing right. It does it for you which means, you can't control it. 

It's easy to sign up. It's free and relatively easy to use. I think the price is doable. Give it a try if you want to. This is never ever gonna be as good as a professionally edited, high resolution music video.  Just saying. 

Advantages: 

- cheap

- quick

- easy to use

- you pay per download when you are satisfied

Disadvantages

- you can't control the cuts, editing

- it's more expensive than doing it for free on your own in iMovie

- very long upload time for mp4s

Warning. Upload one thing at a time. I tried uploading a photo while uploading a film and it didn't work. The uploading of the film ceased and only the photo was uploaded. Their uploading animation is a bit strange (hops back and forth within the bar) but that doesn't matter. 

The first time around I uploaded a few of my pics and then used a slew of theirs. Put them in at random and chose a Directors cut. It was so incredibly terrible. Just didn't make any sense. Then I uploaded a simple video with candles that lasted 4 minutes and tried another filter. Finally I used the cut out text version together with an edited film and it sort of worked for me. Then it got stuck..I mean it crashed. I guess my final word is: You get what you pay for....

https://rotorvideos.com/

Animatron

Animatron works the same way but you have to subscribe and it is too expensive for the little indie musician trying to get their stuff out into the world. It has many more stock photos to choose from, thereof the pricing. I'm just saying, with a limited budget, you'd have to work fast and do many videos a month in order to beat the price of Rotor. If you have the money and release many times a month then this might be better for you. I'll pass. I'll say it again. You get what you pay for. 

Finally, I just settled for iMovie. I hope I can save up some money for Premier. 

https://www.animatron.com/wave/pricing

Animoto

This one is cheaper than Animatron, and has licensed music too. Maybe not able to upload your own music. Don't know, haven't checked it out yet. 

https://animoto.com/pricing

Let me know what you have tried. I would love to hear from you.....

www.featherheadmedia.com

That's all for today.....