Project Unicorn

A lot of space on this blog has been devoted to helping bands promote their sound and style and ultimately, get noticed. While some of the tips I’ve passed on can be used by solo artists as well, independent, unsigned artists face their own unique challenges. Never fear, though. Here are some tips to help you.

Before you try to implement these tips, however, it goes without saying that your demo must be recorded and ready for sale. If, by chance, you aren’t quite there yet, you should know that most record labels won’t even consider you without a demo, which is why next week; I’ll be focusing on tips for demo recording.

Okay, so assuming you have your demo, the first thing that you can do is give away CD’s that contain one or two songs, as well as your contact information so that interested parties can get in touch with you. You can give these out at bookstores, movie theaters, local music venues, etc. Just ask people to listen to your music, and pass the CD on to other people who might like it.

You can also consider paid advertising, both traditional and online. You should already have a website to help promote your music, and should be familiar with online advertising and classified sites. These are good (and free) places to start posting ads. Be sure to identify your genre of music, include a link where people can go to hear it, and mention any gigs or venues that you will be playing in the near future. Unicorn Media is a great site for this very thing, since we specialize in helping bands and solo acts promote themselves and get noticed. If you aren’t part of Unicorn Media yet, this is the time to sign up.

If you have the budget for it, look into advertising in local papers and publications, as well as on the radio, and on local television stations. Many news channels have programs showcasing local talent, and appearing on one of these is a great way to gain exposure.

What else can you do? Play as many gigs and venues as possible, and give out free CD’s, bumper stickers, decals, and t-shirts with your logo on them. Submit your media kit to as many places as possible, and don’t forget to include that all important query/cover letter with each one. This doesn’t have to cost you a fortune---give out a few free items each time, and then have some for sale as well. Once people see others with them, especially others wearing your t-shirts, they will consider buying them.

Until next week: Good Luck!

Meredith Treinen Musings independent artist promotion, music promotion, solo artist promotion

Serving the needs of the artist is why we started Unicorn Media. We saw an opportunity to work differently with artists that want to distribute their work to an online audience. We come at this from an artist's point of view rather than a traditional media company's point of view. We respect artist's rights. Rather than tie up rights to your work, our agreements are non-exclusive. You still own the rights and remain in full control of your work. We also share advertising revenue with you. That's a very different kind of deal compared to traditional music or film distribution deals. Being a friend of the artist is at the core of UM. Our platform is designed to allow listeners and viewers to experience your work as you intended. Take IMAX as an example. They've been living in a YouTube world where people are saying let's promote your art that way. When you look at IMAX's business, their business is based on being different. They are very different from a visual perspective, so it doesn't translate to YouTube. If you're looking at something that's grainy, on a small screen with compression artifacts, you've lost the experience the filmmaker is trying to convey. When you look at a full screen, full stereophonic sound quality across our network, you are closer to where the filmmaker intended it to be. We are able to come closer to the experience that the artist intended in an online venue. Finally, we're your online marketing partner. We are going to help promote you and tell you how to promote yourself. For starters, we spend a great deal of effort optimizing our site and digital media for search engine optimization (SEO). We've made it possible for search engines to find your work even if it's stored as a Flash file. The artist is why we started Unicorn Media. This is what we are doing for you now and there's more coming up for you in the future. We're on your team and open to your ideas.

Meredith Treinen Musings cinema, Flash, IMAX, Video, YouTube

Unless you and your band have been playing under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly heard that playing gigs is absolutely essential to the life of your band, but this may sound like something easier said than done, particularly if your total gig experience so far has been limited to playing for friend's parties.

So how do you get gigs? It is not always easy, particularly for brand new bands, but with a little hard work, it is definitely an achievable goal.

What do you need first? A  good press kit. Press kits, also called press packages and media kits essentially tell anyone who reads them everything that they need to know about your band. Press kits include a cover letter, explaining why your band wants to play a particular gig, a cover page, a band member bio page, photos of your band, a music and equipment page, a demo CD with three or four songs, a booking and contact page, a band business card, and a unique, personalized envelope.

Your cover letter should introduce the members of your band and explain why you have an interest in playing at the club/gig/ or gaining representation from the record label that you have sent the press kit to. Try to keep the bios short, and use black and white photos, the industry standard, as opposed to color. Remember, the press kit is the first impression that people will have of your band.

To make your demo CD, you can buy or rent portable recording equipment or rent time at a recording studio or a local music store. It goes without saying that before you move to the recording stage, you should make sure that your songs are well written and your sound is polished. There are several recording software programs available on the market, the most popular with indie bands being Pro Tools, and you may find that it is more cost effective to learn how to use the software on your own rather than pay for studio time.

You should begin playing open mic nights at local clubs. This is a great way to practice playing on stage in front of an audience, and you can make many valuable contacts at these events, which can lead to paid gigs in the future. You can also offer to open for a local band for free. Most bands, especially indie bands have opening acts and many of them will be receptive to this idea.

These are just some of the ways that you can get gigs and promote your band at the same time. Remember, the success of your band ultimately depends on the efforts of you and the other band members.

Meredith Treinen Musings indie band promotion, tips for getting gigs, unsigned band tips

UnicornMedia.com is now live! Our team has been working for months to bring you the most spectacular entertainment experience available online and their hard work shows in the site we are launching today. We founded Unicorn Media with the understanding that only a small fraction of professionally produced content actually ends up in commercial distribution. We saw the potential for global distribution of creative works on the Internet but it wasn't until recently that two major enabling factors emerged that changed the economics of streaming media:

• The widespread consumer adoption of home broadband connections created a gateway for transporting rich media.
• The recent MPEG-4, Part 10 specification for video compression and decompression allows a better viewing experience with reduced bandwidth requirements.

Our ability to deliver high quality digital streams to your computer answers the concerns of artists who told us that their primary issue with online distribution was that it didn't always promote their work in a high quality format. Now that Uncorn Media is live, we're revolutionizing the way content is viewed, distributed and monetized in this industry. This has allowed us to attract works from a broad range of studios, independent musicians and film makers, including CBS Interactive, IMAX film producers, Revision3, Silverback and many more.

New content is being uploaded to Unicorn Media on a daily basis. We hope you come back frequently to discover a new world of creative content on Unicorn Media.

Meredith Treinen Musings launch, streaming media, unicornmedia.com, website

That's right--our new site is here, and we want all of our loyal blog readers to be among the first to experience it for themselves.   Go to www.unicornmedia right now to see for yourself.

Meredith Treinen Musings Unicorn Media, unicorn media site launch

Last week, I asked you to think of your top five favorite movies and books and to rate the realism factor of the main characters on a scale from 1-10. If you’d like to participate, just leave a comment, and then we can all learn from each other. I’ll include three of my own for now at the end of this post.

Memorable characters don’t happen overnight, and it is much easier to create flat, two-dimensional stereotypes, but when you think about it, even someone who appears to be a two-dimensional stereotype may be very complex. Almost every book or movie with a cynical, street-wise cop as the main character has a plot that reveals that this person has some deep, dark secret from their past, which helps to explain why they act the way that they do.

If dialog is a stumbling block for you, try my tips on this blog from a few weeks ago and see if they help you. You can also try writing the same lines of dialogue for individual characters, paying attention to diction and word choice. This is a great way to discover for yourself how you want your characters to sound.

So here are three of my top five, as promised. If you have any questions about developing characters, leave a comment for me and I’ll respond.

Until next week: Happy Creating!

1. Jeff Winston: Replay by Ken Grimwood

Realism factor: 10

Jeff, as a Replayer (you’ll have to read the book yourself to see what I mean) has the opportunity to relive different stages of his life and make different choices each time, but he doesn’t consider himself to be special or a hero because of it. He makes bad decisions and selfish decisions too. Jeff likes things to be logical, but his special abilities mean that he is living in a constant state of chaos and he comes to the realization that although his life (and his lives) may not seem important to him, he is shaping the lives of others with each replay, for better or for worse.

2. Judas Coyne: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Realism factor: 10

I mentioned Jude in my post last week, so I’ll just say that as characters go, he is one of those characters that leap off of the page and seem so real that it’s hard to believe that they only exist in a book. When he purchases a ghost from an online auction, he is forced to confront his own personal ghosts from the past and break free from what is essentially a selfish, self-absorbed state that he has been stuck in for years.

3. Scarlett O’Hara: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell (this counts as a favorite movie too)

Realism Factor: 7

Everyone loves to hate Scarlett, and unlike many main characters, her basic personality doesn’t change throughout the course of the story. Sure, she loses some husbands, gets her heart broken by Ashley Wilkes, shoots a Yankee soldier, helps Melanie birth her baby, and loses her daughter, Bonnie, in a tragic accident, but through it all, her relentlessly ambitious and optimistic outlook remains consistent. At the end of the story,she is as determined to win Rhett back as she was to win Ashley in the beginning.

Meredith Treinen Musings developing characters, scriptwriting, scriptwriting tips

A fellow blogger, stitchblade, recently wrote a favorable review of this blog.  Specifically, she mentioned that her husband is in a band and that the tips found here about how to get signed were very well written and helpful.  Check out the review o for yourself: http://stitchblade.blogspot.com/2008/09/artists-of-film-and-musiccheck-it-out.html

Meredith Treinen Musings band tips, get signed tips, music review

If you are a writer, particularly a scriptwriter, you know that the characters in a story are the single biggest determiner of its success. Characters that appeal to the audience and characters that seem just like real people are the ones that will stay in their minds for years to come.

So how do you go about creating characters like this? First of all, stay away from stereotypes—far away. Stereotypes are boring. We’ve all seen the movies about the vapid Valley Girl in search of the right prom date, or the hard-bitten, grouchy cowboy who struggles to save his ranch. You get the idea. This doesn’t mean that certain character types are automatically off-limits; just try to use them in creative ways. For example, a hard-bitten, grouchy cowboy with a Valley Girl accent might be interesting.

Your characters need to have real feelings and motivations that your readers and your audience can easily relate to. This is why so many romance films work, because we have all, at one time or another been in love and can relate to another person’s romantic struggles, and the uncertainty of love. Awkwardness works well too—if your characters are a little shy, if they feel out of place in certain social situations, etc, then you can be sure that someone will be able to connect with them on an emotional level.

This doesn’t mean that all of your characters need to be hopelessly romantic and socially awkward, no one likes to watch a movie filled with whiny losers, after all, and some of the most memorable movie characters created were characters who were neither emotionally or socially awkward, or at least, didn’t appear to be that way on the surface. The point is, your characters need to have flaws, personality quirks, and mannerisms, just like you.

One good example of a fully developed character is Judas Coyne from Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill. I picked Jude not because there is an impending movie deal for the book in the works (that I know of) but because he, like most real people, is full of personality contradictions that alternately repel and draw in the reader. We feel for Jude when details of his childhood are revealed, particularly the physical and mental abuse of his father, but we also see the abrasive, dismissive way that he treats his live-in girlfriend, Georgia.

Want to hear more about this character and find out more about how to create your own memorable characters? Tune in next week for Part Two, and until then, your homework assignment is to think about your top five favorite movies and books and rate the realism of the main characters in each one on a scale from 1-10.

I'll share mine with you next time.

Until next week: Happy Scripting!

Meredith Treinen Musings creating movie characters, movie characters, scriptwriting tips