Newcomers beware: you won't be making money right away, and you'll probably
make most of your money from projects other than music videos.
"The best advice I would give anyone trying to break into music videos
is to be realistic about the future of music videos and to make sure they
know how to do other things," says Amy E. "Commercials are the most lucrative,
by far. They're more lucrative than feature film making and they're more lucrative
than music videos."
Amy E. is the executive director of the Music Video Producers Association,
which has 160 members (Amy E. is the name she uses in all of her work). She
says that pretty much every production company that makes music videos costing
more than $20,000 is a member of the association.
Amy E. has also taught a summer course at the University of Southern California
for students who want to become directors. Making music videos turns out to
be harder than many students expect. "They were overwhelmed by the amount
of work that it took to make a video in the course of the class," says Amy
E.
So, it's a lot of work and doesn't pay well for the vast majority of music
video producers. Why do it? Well, if you're reading this article, you probably
already know why. You get to express yourself creatively and work with some
fascinating and very talented people.
"Most of the directors I talk to say that working on a music video is
basically like going on welfare for six weeks," says Amy E. "But at the end
of the day, they've expressed themselves. They still revere music videos as
the most expressive form of film-making, where they have the [greatest] amount of
creative freedom. Because if they direct a commercial, they get paid a lot
of money but some ad writer -- probably in another state -- has written that ad
and told them exactly how to direct it."
Creative expression is what it's all about for Prudence Fenton, a producer
in Los Angeles. Her huge list of creative endeavors includes the production
of music videos, beginning with her first video in 1986. In 1994 Fenton won
a Grammy for producing and co-creating a Peter Gabriel video, "Steam." She
has also won two Emmy awards for her work as an animation and special effects
producer for Peewee's Playhouse.
"I kind of did them here and there," says Fenton of her early days in music
video production. "I [also] produced a lot of commercials. As a freelancer,
I'd do whatever came up. Then I got into doing TV shows for a while -- that
was a longer gig.
"I would bounce around...and back then it wasn't exactly like music videos
was a field," Fenton says. "You sort of did whatever production came along."
Fenton says that new technology allows aspiring producers and directors
to get noticed by starting small and putting their work on the Internet.
Believe it or not, even the largest studios are starting to look for the
next great thing on the Internet. Fenton says it's a great way to get discovered.
"There are so many young artists or talented people just doing stuff on YouTube,
and the executives are combing YouTube now for their talent," says Fenton.
"I was in a meeting at Disney the other day and they're going, 'So, where
can we go to find the young talent, other than YouTube?'"
Gabriel Napora is a music video producer who has produced
videos for the likes of Bif Naked, Matthew Good, Sweatshop Union and
the Swollen Members.
"We do all sorts of things," says Napora. "We do music videos, commercials,
virals -- tons of different things."
Virals are videos that are meant to promote a product by catching the attention
of web surfers who find it so funny, entertaining or just plain cool that
they share it with their friends. Like a virus, the video spreads around the
world and gets great publicity for the company or product featured in the
video.
What would Napora suggest to someone brand new to video production?
"If it's someone that actually wants to make a living with this, it would
be to not go into this area but to branch into more like Internet-based virals
and stuff like that," he says. "That's more of a growth area. I own a side
company that does virals. We just did a series of virals for Electronic Arts
and those paid far better than any music video would."
Despite the challenges, Napora says there are many appealing aspects to
working in video production.
"Every project's different," he says. "I enjoy working with the people,
I enjoy being on set, I enjoy the challenges that happen. I also enjoy seeing
the end product. That's really cool."