Between the Buried and Me "Colors" Album Trailer
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» Background:
After my disappointment with the Aiden trailer, and similar issues with the Darkest Hour trailer, I had insisted that the relevant staff members come together as early as possible to discuss what we were going to do for the (then) upcoming Between the Buried and Me trailer. It was a big release, and there was a lot of expectation and excitement for this album, particularly on my end.

BTBAM is my favorite band on the label and i really wanted the trailer for this to be the best it possibly could.

The band is a metalcore band, that leans heavily on progressive and experimental tendencies. The album "Colors" is actually one 65 minute long song, divided up into 8 sections for tracks. It branched all over the place, from Queen bombasts, Pink Floyd atmosphere, jazz improvs, what almost sounds like circus music, and Tom Waits inspirations, to name a few of the places the album goes when they aren't playing death metal.

Of course, the challenge for us, to create a cohesive experience around an album that's all over the place, led to some rather odd ideas. The band's personal tastes kept us from going the standard 'metal' aesthetic. No skulls, no evil, no metal cliches. The band has quite a sense of humor about themselves, so we thought maybe we should play on that.

After much deliberation, we settled on an 8 day campaign of parody websites. For example, the first day was to be a parody of a news site like AbsolutePunk.com, where all the news would be about BTBAM, and the first song would be available for streaming on that site for 24 hours. The next day there was to be a mock radio site (like Q101.com or KROQ), with fake ads promoting fake BTBAM stadium tours and radio, stats, along with a second song for streaming, etc.

We even had a dating site planned, where a girl with a name that would play on BTBAM (Bea Teabam or something ridiculous) offers each user her phone number, which would have led to a voicemail recording from the band. Along with other silly stuff.

All seemed well, the band approved, we had enough time to do it, and we got excited about it. Somewhere along the line, someone changed their minds. I can't remember who, i just remember that all of a sudden, we had to start from scratch.

We asked Tommy (BTBAM's singer) to send us his interpretation of the lyrics for each song, to give us more direction on where to go with the trailer. We figured he'd have interesting stuff to say, and our assumptions were not unfounded. The problem was, the interpretations we got from him were quite personal, and of course, quite out there. We were running out of a comfortable window of time to get started on a trailer, and could not come to any consensus on what to do with his interpretations.

It was becoming urgent, since because the songs were so long (two over 10 minutes, shortest one being almost 7) we couldn't have a video for the song, which was a big handicap to the album's success. So a lot of the promotion of the album was basically resting on the album trailer.

While reading over the interpretations, i began to notice how visual the descriptions and lyrics were, and that i kept imagining scenes and surreal imagery in my head. I then remembered something i helped with on a Mars Volta forum, where we put out a CD of the community's resident musicians, based around interpretations of a common theme.

» The Idea:
I suggested that I would make Art Interpretations of each song, based on Tommy's lyrics, and that our video guy would produce his own video interpretations of the lyrics. We would combine the first two songs (as they are listed as part A and part B anyway), and have a 7 day weekday campaign, streaming one song each day, in order and in its entirety (via the videos), as a countdown to the album's release. Each day would have a color theme, and there would be surprises that we'd ad-lib along the way.

The kicker, was that fans could then sign up to submit their own interpretations of each songs, the best one winning a prize pack. People do their own versions of pretty much any song you can think of on sites like YouTube, and of course, there's always kids in the comment sections ranting about how they could have done better. And that's the very angle we played with this trailer.

And so, we produced 7 original Art pieces, and one 65 minute long music video for "Colors". The band loved the idea. They were also able to send some live footage of them playing the newer songs, which we decided would be one of the few surprises we planned for whoever followed along.

Of course, we were all on edge though. Victory had never done anything like this before (nor any other label we could think of), and it had the potential to be a total disaster. There was no guarantee anyone would like the trailers, might confuse it as official releases, not sign up to send in submissions, etc.

And of course, no one knew what to expect, especially from the videos. We didn't actually have time to shoot anything ourselves, so the video guy made interpretations from stock and public domain videos and movies. Not to mention, his ideas for the videos were way less linear than even Tommy's interpretations were. Nevertheless, we went for it.

Of course, i forgot that i also needed to set up 8 websites. One homepage and 7 for each song. Not that it was hard to do, but I was also in a rush to make sure i at least had the first day's art piece done. I decided to with minimal background art, a version of art from the booklet layout. I went for a slick, slightly web 2.0, sophisticated look. As little text as possible, and as much open space as possible, so the interpretations would not be competing with the sites that hosted them. The videos were displayed at 640x480, and the Art at about 760px wide.

Our video guy was basically cranking out a video a day, and i was still without a piece for the first day. i eventually reworked an older art piece i already had to fit the tone of the first song, mostly to make sure we could launch this correctly. The staff started to get real excited as we presented them with each Interpretation as we finished them, and press releases and marketing campaigns had already been set in motion. There was a lot of expectation on our end, as well as a slight buzz starting to build around the various news sites and forums we blasted the info to.

The first day came, and of course, everything (on my end) was up at the last minute. We also started a campaign of myspace and email bulletins that would document each day's events. Then, we held our breath (well at least i did).

Our server was CRAWLING. So many people came to view the first trailer, that it more or less killed our site, and the album trailer. I hosted the video elsewhere on my personal web server, and lost an entire month's bandwidth in about 20 minutes. I moved it back to the Victory server and just decided to let it play itself out.

about 10,000 views in a day, when we usually get 10,000 views on our entire site in a week. people figured out that you could start accessing the videos and art for the other songs by changing colors in the url (i.e. www.victoryreocrds.com/albumtrailers/colors/orange) so i had to take down all content on the upcoming pages (but left the colored backgrounds as a teaser). we also got over 100 comments on the first trailer. we were psyched as hell. since the videos ended abruptly, kids were anxious to see the next day's video ASAP (mostly for the new song, of course).

and so it went, each day putting up a new song, taking down the previous one. kids who missed the previous videos were bummed and resolved to make sure the caught the rest. people were even arguing over the merits of the art and video interpretations, with regulars starting to pop up in the comments sections. we even saw that people had already ripped the videos to YouTube.

The band started to comment as well, which we of course, included in the daily blasts, which drove even more kids to the trailer.
We decided to leave the 3rd song up once it became live, as it was the single for the album anyway. It would remain up for the rest of the countdown, and afterwards, while the other songs followed the original plan. The pages for every song already played remained up with the Art Interpretations, as well as wallpapers, Tommy's interpretations, and a sign up form for the upcoming submissions site.

Over the first weekend, we took a "break" from the countdown, but secretly put up a live video of the the first song, which caused quite a buzz itself. The next followed with the remaining trailers that ended with the launch of the submissions site and a 3 day break, where an exclusive MySpace album stream took effect.

The day before release saw all the trailers put back up, as well as a "Colors" themed version of VictorStream, with all the videos in sequence, as well as songs from their previous albums.

From release day on, we promoted the submissions site as much as we could. That ended up with over 100 submissions which were voted on by visitors to the site, and the winner being Steven Patterson, who created a storyline based around the Art Interpretations i made.

and no, that was not a factor in his victory :)
it was his legitimately based on votes.

Overall, the trailer was an unexpected, runaway success. All told, over 115,000 people viewed the trailers (and actually a lot more, because i only tracked the homepage, only tracking each individual page the last week), with over 2000 links to the trailers from forums, news sites, and blogs all over the web. When the Interpretations contest winner was announced, all the videos were put back up.

This is by far my favorite project i've done for Victory, and am still surprised they even let us do it.

Between the Buried and Me "Colors" Album Trailer

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one idea which sadly never materialized was that we were going to release the videos as a silent DVD and offer it free via torrent sites. the idea was that someone who bought/downloaded the album could sync it up (with cues provided) and have an experience much like people trying to sync up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard of Oz. For now, we are going to keep the DVD option for future endeavors and promotions concerning BTBAM, who just today i found out is going on tour with DREAM THEATER. Much, much props to them.