Producing a band showreel, any tips?

topdog91

We (fun party band, hits from 60s to now) want to create a new showreel for 2024 due to line up changes and wanting to be more professional. Basically about five minutes, five songs from different genres and decades etc.

Plan is to spend a day in a studio and cut some live multitracks which we can tweak more later (mix, overdubs etc) in our keyboard player's studio.

Then find a venue with a stage, set up 2-3 cameras on tripods and film ourselves playing to the tracks.

Edit the whole lot in Premiere or whatever.

Any dos / don'ts / tips appreciated, whether they are to do with the plan, budgetary, quality, whatever.

Musicwolf

Don’t overestimate the attention span of your audience.  We recorded and shot ours ourselves and I tried to limit the clips to 30 or even 20 seconds.

https://www.starbelly.me/video

RocknRollDave

Purely a personal view but it drives me up the wall when bands DON’T look at the camera. Check out websites of function bands and you’ll see most of them are looking at someone or something off-camera. I guess the feeling is that it’s somehow naff or trite to sing to the camera, but if you don’t you’re straight away distancing yourself from the person watching the showreel - the very person you need to engage.

robinbowes

RocknRollDave said:

Purely a personal view but it drives me up the wall when bands DON’T look at the camera. Check out websites of function bands and you’ll see most of them are looking at someone or something off-camera. I guess the feeling is that it’s somehow naff or trite to sing to the camera, but if you don’t you’re straight away distancing yourself from the person watching the showreel - the very person you need to engage.

Seconded.

Also, don’t be a band that doesn’t look at the audience when playing, and don’t look bored!

MikkiMcMurderer

Try and get a friend to do a hand held camera out of the 3 and create some movement - it makes all the difference to the energy level.
A Hazer and Lazers if possible!
Here's our effort we did a short edit and a longer edit
https://www.superchargerband.com/

matt_sefton

Musicwolf said:

Don’t overestimate the attention span of your audience.  We recorded and shot ours ourselves and I tried to limit the clips to 30 or even 20 seconds.

https://www.starbelly.me/video

This is great advice. A verse and chorus from a song is more than enough. I’d also be careful how much post production you do to the tracks as people really want to hear how you sound live in front of an audience. It would even help to rope in family and friends when you’re filming so you’re playing to an audience rather than to an empty room.
I was a creative producer in adland in my former life so spent most days filming and editing ads, showreels etc. 
And look like you’re enjoying yourselves :-)

theatreanchor

Fine minutes is long. You only really 2-3 mins max. Dont take it too seriously. Have some fun. 

Danny1969

What I found to be the most effective thing for our band when we were starting out was live footage but with good audio. This was back in 2005 before you could record live in multitrack off a digital desk so I built a mobile Protools system and fed it from the direct outs of our analog mixer. Nowadays you can just shove a USB thumb drive into a digital desk and achieve the same thing. 

Then the trick is to incorporate a bit of the camera mic noise into the recording from the desk so it picks up the audience ... so it sounds live but with a more produced sound than you would ever get from just a camera or a phone. 

Also, rather than static cameras it's actually much more interesting to have someone moving with the camera. Like get a friend to move along the band as you are playing live and mix that in with fixed camera shots

One of the most effective promo videos I did with a band was the Kate Bush tribute. It was done so cheaply ... we simply recorded the music live as a band complete with vocals in the local rehearsal place then due to too much drum spill in the vocal mic I got Katie to redo the lead vocals in my dining room covered over with a dog blanket to avoid reflections. 

The we hired a camera guy and mimed to the music on a stage at our local music venue in the daytime. The whole thing cost about £400 and made us many thousands. 

stickyfiddle

Bumping this as my lot are in the planning stages for a proper reel. 

I figure 3-4 mins with a compilation of a few songs. Not sure on live vs mimed yet hit may depend on filming logistics as much as anything else. 

Any more thoughts are welcome, esp aiming for expensive corporate/wedding type gigs?

topdog91

OP again here. Can barely get my lot to visit the studio that we might want to use to meet the engineer etc! Bloody day jobs...

RocknRollDave

Speaking as a wedding muso with videos crammed full of ‘quirky’ actions and overthought elements of “Oh it’ll look great if we [insert something that WON’T LOOK GREAT]”, I’ll just say:
Cut the nonsense out, keep it simple, Stupid. 

Quality playing of popular songs by musicians who look like they’re enjoying* themselves is all you need.

And LOOK AT THE CAMERA.

*’enjoying themselves’ not ‘desperately trying to look FUN’


EDIT:
My videos are all mimed…. 

If you can do a genuinely LIVE video, you can push that heavily when you’re chasing bookings. In other words, watch this video and you can be sure this is EXACTLY what we sound like.

Musical_Mystery_Tour

Story board it and block it (aka sort out the positions of people and what the cameras can see). You don't have to be great at drawing to do that, stick man figures will do.

If you have a shot list of what you definitely want and you have your camera positions planned, it will save a lot of later frustration when it comes to the edit. Shoot more than you need; this will give you options at the editing stage.

Read up on techniques (framing, shot length etc). If nobody among you is professional at filmmaking, I can recommend this book (it's very short, you can easily read it all in one evening). They used to make new directors at ITV read that on their first day and I used to get my film students to do the same. It's old, but it will tell you everything you need to know.

Rkphilpot

3-4 mins will be way too long. As others have said 30 seconds at most. People will have made up their minds within 10 seconds. We recorded one by recording the tracks we wanted in a live situation so it didn't sound too studio produced then filmed ourselves playing using loads of old iphones. Just overdubed the sound. Its not amazing but it wasnt bad.