From the archives: some cancelled music video (Patreon)

Here's a little thing nobody has seen before, aside from this one very slimy record executive!

It was 2016. I'd managed to save up some money the previous year, and so I thought I would take a break from freelancing to work on Double King full time and get it finished. But of course, the savings had nearly run out before Double King was anywhere near done. And when you freelance, it’s not like you can just take on a shift either- it requires a couple months of hunting and negotiating to secure a job, and even longer for anyone to pay your invoice, and I had left it dangerously late.

That’s when this job popped into my inbox! It was initially going to pay quite well, and was for a different song off the same album.
I had been trying to negotiate specifics of the contract, but the label was dragging their feet with it, and with a tight deadline I had to start work before anything was signed.

After already doing a lot of preliminary work and a bit of animating for the first song, some exec changed their mind about the lead single, leaving me with only 2 weeks to make a new clip for a different track I’d never heard. If you’ve been following my progress on here, you can probably guess that 2 weeks is an extraordinarily tight deadline, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make anything in that time. But I did!

Partway through, and still before anything was signed, they inexplicably slashed the budget to a third of what we’d initially agreed to. It was like talking to a wall trying to fight them on anything because my correspondent was some guy who only wrote 5-word emails and wouldn’t answer any questions, and I had no other job offers, so my best chance at getting any money at all was pushing through. I signed the dodgy contract and invoiced them for the first half of the money.

THEN, on the day I finished the clip, while I was uploading the file to send to them, I got an email saying that they changed their mind on the song again, and asking if I could just “change whatever I had” to be for a different track. Obviously, that’s not how it works at all, and I sent them “whatever I had”, which was this entire music video you see here.

“The board” decided they didn’t like it, and it was for the wrong song anyway, so they binned it. I never got to talk to the band themselves throughout this whole process, and I doubt they ever got to see the final thing.

Of course, they hadn’t paid my invoice for the first half of the money yet, and I had to email them every other day for a month and kept being ghosted, until they finally agreed to pay my invoice, provided I gave it to them in writing that I would not ask for the other half of the money.

So, in the end, I got 1/6th of what I’d originally signed up for, which would’ve barely covered the living costs for the time the job was happening, so I was basically back where I started.  But almost immediately after, I managed to get this other music video job that was much much better—> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pviC25b3Lv8

For this song, I also only had 2 weeks to make it, and as much as the other job was a nightmare, I’m kind of glad I got a practice round at making a music video that fast because the next one came out much better.
And since the first one never got released, I even got to reuse some stuff to speed things along, like the growing vine effect, and the animation of the moon falling into the ocean!
This was for a much bigger label that looked after me a lot better, and also paid me well enough that I was able to finish Double King!

Anyway, that's the story behind this music video. Not my best work, but a learning experience. Please don't leak it to the bigger internet, because I don't want to give this record label a reason to talk to me ever again.