By Ivan Stanojevic

The Sell-A-Tapes

Week one we were painting mugs. Week two we were shooting short movies and writing poetry. By week three we were suddenly bombarded with four briefs and we knew – the war has begun. Every single brief we’ve had so far has been challenging but also very fun to do. Through working in teams we got to know each other better and also learned how to function with others. I feel like I still haven’t worked with more than half the intake. Next week we start working in teams of two. Poster briefs avait us the upcoming week, it’s exciting that we are finally nearing working on ad briefs.

I thought this was a good time to reflect on some of the things I learned from our music brief. First off, creating a good music video is challenging. And shooting, as usual, takes ages to do. Writing a song is not as hard as I initially thought. It’s good if you know someone, who is musically inclined, so you don’t have to resort to creating a 10-second loop as your instrumental. 

I loved working with my team for the music brief, but I’m not going to say we didn’t have our ups and our downs. Immediately after getting the brief we kind of agreed on the feel and look of the video. Sleek and slav, was one of the names thrown around. We had imagined this super cool video of us in Brixton accompanied by a dope trap/hip-hop song in which we would rap. On the first day of recording the song, our dreams came crashing down. We realized all we had as the instrumental was a short loop and that none of us (except for maybe Dean) could rap. So we changed the song and created this ritualistic sounding jam that Bjork would be proud of. 

We planned on keeping the original video for the new song, but after Rob showed us a few cool music videos, we realized that we didn’t really have a concept for the video. It was just cool shots of us looking cool. Which can be good, but we can do better. After a few discussions with the team, we decided to go in a completely different direction and create something spooky and creepy, which goes well with the song. It was a great learning experience.

Even though we killed our baby early on, we still managed to get a few recordings of it before we killed it. So here it is, in its full glory. The unreleased jam, back when it was called Buying In and we were The Sell-A-Tapes. Also trigger warning: the short song is filled with expletives, because it’s apparently easier to rhyme when every second word is a curse word.