**Guest post by Hank & Cupcakes, Brooklyn based Indie/Pop/Rock duo.

Hey guys, Hank & Cupcakes here.

This is our latest music video for our song 'Shut Up'. We shot it in the shower of our hotel room in Tulsa OK while on tour, it didn't cost anything to make.

All of us are aware of how important the visual aspect of our music is for promoting, exposing and marketing our band. It seems that many indie bands are afraid of making their own videos mainly because there's a common mythological assumption that it is very complicated, expensive and technically demanding to create this kind of content, so many bands don't even try to explore this territory which is today as accessible to us as the audio recording field is.

We left our label a couple of years ago because we wanted to be independent and have full control over our creative ideas. The only problem was that we'd never independently created a video or audio recordings before because we thought that it was too complicated to do. We understood that in order to be truly independent, it was necessary for us to learn how to produce music and video content ourselves.

+Constant Creation

We started messing around with recording ourselves in the subway, in our bathroom, at central park etc. and we started shooting video ideas with our phone. Suddenly a lot of things seemed possible. We discovered that there is no need to buy an expensive video editing program, you can subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud where you basically lease the software for $19.99 a month and can quit at any moment. Here is the website - http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html

Then one day while watching tutorials on video editing on Youtube, we discovered a website called www.Lynda.com, which had many extremely helpful courses on video editing as well as courses about how to use of Protools, Ableton, photoshop and just generally a lot of Audio and video software related topics. We subscribed and started taking courses while working on our record.

The first music video we made was for our song 'Cocaina'. It was shot on our iPhone 4S using the 8mm app which Cupcakes then edited on her laptop.

We later invested in a camera and shot 3 more music videos as well as lots of other promotional content including teasers, live performance videos etc.

Learning how to shoot and edit yourself is NOT complicated, it just takes some practice and experimentation. Let's put it this way: if you can play an instrument, you can probably operate a camera at least in a basic manner (and definitely shoot with your smart phone..) AND, if you can operate Pro Tools, Ableton, Cubase etc. you can also operate video editing software.

+Musings From The Tail

With minimal to no budget at all using your creative ideas and having fun with your band and friends, which is what we all like to do anyway, you can come up with awesome results!

Have fun!

Hank & Cupcakes

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+Do It Your Fucking Self...the blog

+The New Music & Entertainment Business: Easier Than You Think?

+Survival of the Indie Artist