On Friday 28th September, alternative metal band THE HARA released their long awaited single, ‘Trophy’. This was the band's first new music release in over a year and the first of a new chapter in their career; a period of independent releases following the departure from their previous record label. Needless to say, expectations were high and there was plenty of nervous excitement within the band’s camp and the fanbase alike.
We’ve been working in a creative capacity with THE HARA since late 2018 when we were brought in by their management to help to shape the creative direction of the band. In that time, we’ve developed a deep understanding of the band as artists and established a symbiotic, creative relationship based around always striving to do more creatively and pushing boundaries.
It came as no surprise then, when we were asked to manage the creative and marketing for this hotly anticipated track. It’s been a long journey to get to release day, which has required significant hours of work to create countless assets, from music videos to merch designs. It’s a great example of the work that we do as a full service production company, so let’s take a deep dive into the background, concept and creation of THE HARA’s ‘Trophy’ campaign. It was quite an involved process, so we’re going to split this into two, more digestible chunks. We’ll link to part 2 here once it’s up.
The brief from the band was relatively simple: they wanted to strip everything back. They felt like they were at a point in their career where they wanted to be taken seriously and valued as a band for their musicianship and talent and not for any trends, fads or gimmicks.
During their previous album campaign, the creative had been based around a narrative concept with colourful characters and out of this world visual effects. For this record, the band wanted to strip back all of these visual layers and let the music do the talking. They felt like it was time to plant a flag in the ground of the UK metal scene and show both the fans and the music industry what they were made of. In many ways, this was back to basics, back to where it all started, back to being a band without trying to please anyone but themselves. Everything visually attached to this single release and marketing campaign would need to be gritty, raw and real.
This brief was to apply to the single release as a whole and not just the music video or the album artwork. The task was to create a visual marketing campaign that would meet this requirement of showcasing the band’s raw musicianship across all assets to all audiences.
Because we are primarily a film and video production company, we always approach the creative for a record through the music video. Whilst we have expanded into a full service music industry creative agency over the last few years, the music video still comes first for us and it will always be our gateway into the creative vision of a campaign.
With that in mind, we started fleshing out the single creative campaign with the ‘Trophy’ music video. Based on the brief from the band, we knew the music video had to be a performance video at its heart. We’ve created music videos for THE HARA in the past that have had elements of performance to fill out wider narratives, but for this video, we knew that this main focus had to be the performance. Seeing the band performing the track had to be the star of the show and everything else we did needed to elevate that.
So, how to stage and capture a stand out performance? We chose to set the band in the middle of an empty warehouse space. We know this is a tried and tested music video cliche, but we wanted a backdrop that was plain yet interesting; something that provided depth and production value without being distracting from the central performance. An empty warehouse space also met the criteria of keeping all of the aesthetic elements of this campaign raw and gritty.
For the actual performance set up, we decided to have the band play in a circle facing inwards towards each other and not playing ‘out’ to an external audience. This video was about letting the music do the talking, but also about the band getting back to their core experience as a band; the joy of playing music for themselves without any external interference or demands.
What about the overall aesthetic? Was there any way to elevate the deeper meaning within the video at all? Taking inspiration from the vulnerable lyrics of the track and combining them with the band’s desire to peel back all the performative layers of the music industry, we decided to focus on ‘skin’ as the central aesthetic to frame this video. The opening lyric of the track is ‘I wear my skin like a trophy’. We took dual meaning from this and focussed on how vulnerable you can be when you're stripped down to your skin and also how your skin can be your ultimate barrier and shield to the outside world. We suggested the band perform the track topless, putting their skin on display like a trophy and truly having nothing to hide behind when performing. Seeing as the band are all covered in tattoos, we chose to really focus on the details of their skin as an extended visual metaphor and to also give a small extra element to the music video to sit alongside the performance. Plus…what’s more metal than tattoos, right?
Combining these elements left us with a gritty, raw music video that was 90% band performance with a little taste of metaphoric visuals to elevate the whole experience.
The music video shoot was a one day production with a small crew. We shot in a disused Victorian mill in Bolton, just outside Manchester. It was the perfect industrial setting for this stripped back music video.
Overall, the production elements were very simple. We set the band up in the middle of the space, in an insular circle formation as conceptualised. For lighting, we kept things very simple so as not to distract from the performance - we had 4 large, white lights behind the band to frame the space. We had these lights static for the slower parts of the song and strobing for the heavier parts to really highlight the rise and fall within the track. A final, small key light was used to fill in the band against the bright lights behind them and that was it; a naturalistic set up that let the location and the band do the heavy lifting.
We spent most of the day filming the performance over and over again in order to capture it from every angle. All of the camera work was hand held so that every frame would have energy to it and we’d worked in advance with the band to make sure we were capturing the key moments of each instrument and vocal to truly capture and showcase the musicianship on display. We shot a full performance of the whole track on each angle - that might seem like overkill, but we wanted to have as much material as possible to create additional video assets for social media as part of the wider marketing campaign. More on this in part 2.
The video was shot on a Sony FX6 with some vintage Konica hexanon lenses to give everything texture and for the close ups of tattoos, we used a Canon tilt shift lens to give even more texture and stylised depth to everything. We continued this aesthetic by adding some tilt shift to the performance shots and a couple of vocal-only run throughs on the tilt shift lens to tie everything together. Using the tilt shift lens allowed us to elevate what could otherwise have been relatively mundane visuals and give them a more dynamic and interesting aesthetic. When it came to lens and camera choice, we wanted to give as much depth and texture as possible in camera to match the band’s desire for a gritty, real, lived-in look.
We took inspiration from the location for the colour grade and kept everything relatively monotone, adding a steely blue hue to the highlights. The other additional post production element was to create an intro and outro that incorporated three symbols. The symbols are representative of a new aesthetic to the band's visual output that is slowly being teased…as a result we can’t say too much about it right now! The symbols were created in After Effects and helped to give an extra element to the video for fans to dig into.
The full music video turned out exactly as we wanted it to, which is great! BUT…we’re getting ahead of ourselves in the timeline of production and release. The response has been overwhelmingly positive since release though and has pulled in greater numbers of views and engagement than anticipated.
As far as the production timeline goes, we shot the music video months in advance of the release. As discussed above, it was the first visual element of the entire creative campaign that we envisioned and created. Once we had it in hand, we felt like we knew what ‘Trophy’ looked like and that allowed us to start mapping out and conceptualising the wider amount of visual assets that would be required to market the single release. This covered everything from single artwork to merchandise, along with a whole load of social media video assets.
We’ll dive into all of that side of things next time, in the second part of this blog.
With this blog, hopefully we’ve been able to showcase how much thought goes into the creative direction of not just a music video, but the aesthetics of a single release as a whole. We absolutely love working with bands and bringing their vision to life and we hope you’ve enjoyed getting a glimpse behind the curtain of what went into the ‘Trophy’ music video.
If you’ve been inspired by anything you’ve read here and want to check out more of our music video production work then you can see it all here. If you’re looking to release a single and wondering how to handle the visually creative side of the music industry, then why not drop us a line and see how we can help? We can get involved with everything from designing band merchandise to planning out a social media video marketing strategy.