Around The World In Indie Days
(Culminating Experience)

A reflective report on conceptualising & producing an indie music TV show

	
  

Aalap Deboor
MA in Music Business & Global Entertainment

Index
Description ………………………………………………………………………… 3
Process ……………………………………………………………………………. 4
Results ……………………………………………………………………………... 7
Next Steps …………………………………………………………………………. 8
Contribution To The Profession/ Discipline …………………………………… 10
Impact On Professional Development …………………………………………. 11
Appendix ………………………………………………………………………….. 12

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Description
My culminating experience is a music show for TV/ the Web called Around
The World In Indie Days. The show aims to chronicle the lives of independent
artistes around the globe, watch them go about their daily lives, and present a
collaborative effort between them in the form of a song, which is subsequently
released for download on the show’s portal and social media. The central
theme is to hand over a major portion of the content curation process to the
audience, and let them have a say in the collaboration process and interview
questions. Upon my return to India, the show will be pitched to MTV Indies,
India’s first 24-hour independent music and culture channel backed by Pepsi
as an anchor sponsor. The idea would be to fly down 12 Indian indie artistes
per season to an overseas town renowned for their indie music scene, and
have them collaborate with 12 local artistes, featuring two artistes per
episode.

As part of the first episode, the show – presently based in Valencia – will
feature two independent musicians from the Berklee College of Music who are
students of the music business masters programme there and have been
active independent artistes throughout their lives. Kareem Clarke, aka DJ
kTunes, 24, was born and brought up in Brooklyn, New York, and has a five
year background in club DJ-ing besides playing multiple instruments including
guitar, piano, drums and the flute. Carl Pires, born in the UK and raised in
Australia, is a 23-year-old drummer who has played with four bands till date
and is now part of the Berklee business program band, the A69s, with whom
he’s played extensively within the city and also toured to Barcelona.

	
  

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While Clarke has a significant following on Facebook and Twitter with close to
600 followers, Pires doesn’t yet have an artiste page as he hasn’t begun
releasing his solo material. The show, as of now, doesn’t have any digital
presence as any channel or content production agency that buys the rights to
go on with it is entrusted with the responsibility of curating its content, and will
also manage its social media in accordance with future artistes.

Process
I conceptualised the show in September, 2013 as part of my culminating
experience for the music business masters programme at Berklee Valencia.
Back then, although the idea was the same, I’d approached two students from
the Berklee film scoring masters programme – Niko Paterakis from Greece
and Joao Soeiro from Portugal – to gauge their interest in participating as
featured artistes on the pilot. Both Niko and Joao loved the idea and said yes
almost immediately.

Over the next month I developed a first draft of the script and ran them by it.
They had a lot of suggestions to offer, which I was more than glad to
incorporate into the final version. As part of their culminating experience, they
said, they would be travelling to London to record a piece with the London
symphonic orchestra, and they wanted me to include footage from that in the
episode. While I was initially concerned about the rights to this footage and
how I’d go about acquiring it working on a shoestring budget, they assured me

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that they owned all the rights to it and they’d help me acquire it without any
extra costs.

And so we locked the script, and I proceeded to draft a shoot schedule,
comprising rehearsals, studio sessions, jams, etc – starting December, 2013.
Owing to our tight schedules the show would basically be shot over the next
four to five months – depending entirely on the artistes’ availability. The first
month was dedicated entirely to jams and rehearsal sessions where Niko and
Joao would meet in each others’ houses and school to jam and compose an
original song for the episode. The next two months would be spent in the
studio recording the song, tweaking it, mixing and
mastering, and adding final touches. And the last month was designated for
the interview, random shots around the city, school, their houses, clubs, bars,
pubs, live music venues, etc.

During the December break everything seemed to be on track. When we met
in January, however, the new semester had just begun, and their schedules
were more packed than last semester. We tried to schedule two sessions in
January, but they fell through. Then I went to France for the MIDEM
conference, and again no work happened for another week. When I came
back and arranged a meeting with Joao and Niko, it was obvious that setting
time apart for the show wasn’t as easy as it’d seemed earlier, especially with
lurking deadlines, project submissions and a fast-approaching midterm week.
Even so we decided to plod through, and with some minor tweaks in the
production sheet, scheduled a shoot that week.

	
  

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The first shoot was a studio session with Joao where he was scoring
background music for a Russian short film. The second one, too, featured
Joao, this time recording percussion samples on the film scoring stage as part
of a school project. The footage, undoubtedly, was very useful and I was very
excited that work had finally begun. But when I went back home and reviewed
the shots it dawned on me that the first session had happened almost four
months after we first talked about it. Within the next couple of days I decided
that it would be hard to make this happen, for no other reason than the fact
that our schedules were very dissimilar, we hardly ever hung out together as
often as we had in the early months of school, and deny it as we may, there
just wasn’t that personal connect. Even if we did go through, the show
wouldn’t be as interesting as I’d intended it to be.

And so I wrote Joao and Niko an email explaining the problem, and asked to
meet them personally to discuss the issue. We met the next day, and they
seemed to
know exactly what I was talking about. Graciously they backed out of the
show and I found myself closer than ever to the deadline without any artistes
to feature. My grand Gantt timeline with its super idealistic schedule stared
me in the face as a bad joke I’d made at my expense.

It was March already. I’d taken the social media course, as part of which I was
managing social media for the A69s and Kareem. Throughout the month I
found myself hanging out with them more than I ever had… Kareem and I

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even made a trip to Barcelona to see the band live. Somewhere down the line
Kareem said that he’d be willing to feature on the episode if I wanted. But
Kareem was a DJ, and my initial vision comprised live musicians. That’s when
he suggested bringing Carl on board. He said that he would mix tunes on the
turntable while Carl played live drums. Besides, they were collaborating on a
song for his EP anyway. At the time it seemed like a good idea, but I wanted
to confirm with Carl before I made anything final.

The following week I spoke to Carl on my way back home from a ball meeting
at the Westin Hotel. I told him about the show, and asked if he’d be willing to
feature in the pilot opposite Kareem. Immediately he said yes, and invited me
to the Chinese restaurant across from school to talk more about it. I explained
the entire concept to him, he gave me some good suggestions, and by the
end of the day I had two talented artistes – and good friends – willing to
feature on the pilot. I came back home, deleted the Gantt chart, the old shoot
schedules, scripts, footage, everything, and started over anew.

Surprisingly, the writing now seemed so much easier and had a natural flow to
it. As I wrote on, I realised that I’d made the right choice by asking Kareem
and Carl to do this. It might be a couple of months delayed, but the project
would turn out according to my expectations.

Results
Kareem, Carl and I began shooting mid-April. The first session was a
rehearsal jam, which I used as a promo for my music video class that

	
  

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semester. Within a week the school broke for Spring break, and again there
was a bit of a lag. But in the first week of May we made up for all the time
we’d lost, packing in a studio session, jam and rehearsal. Fortunately, the
school had just acquired a bunch of professional Canon cameras, lenses,
lights, lapel microphones, tripods, light stands and other shooting equipment,
which I put to very good use.

I wasn’t ever really worried about overshooting my budget as my student
filmmaking experience had taught me that one camera is all you need to
shoot absolutely anything. But for professional quality recordings that I wanted
to show to people I would definitely need all the other equipment too. Over
that week I checked out all that equipment no less than five times, filming at
every opportunity I got. Carl and Kareem went to London over the summer
break, and again we didn’t shoot for about four weeks. But when they got
back we immediately hit the studio and recorded a session. That weekend
both Carl and Kareem were playing at the Loco Club, and that’s when I got a
huge portion of the footage I used on the final episode.

Finally, all that remained were the interviews. Just a couple of days before
June 15th I got Carl and Kareem in the studios once more, and recorded their
interviews within a couple of hours. Now all that I needed to do was put
together all the footage, make a first edit and sync it with some nice music.
Around June 20th I sat down to do the first edit, and had a rough cut ready by
midnight. I did some basic sound editing, levelling, colour correction and
transitions, and it looked pretty good. However, I still wasn’t very happy as I

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couldn’t find a good ending to the pilot. I tried out a bunch of combinations but
nothing seemed to work. Finally, I decided to ask for help from Jon Forsyth,
my video production professor from last semester.

Jon, ever the helpful person, agreed immediately to watch the pilot and give
me his suggestions. We booked out a studio, watched the whole episode, and
he gave me some very valuable suggestions in terms of shot selection, edits,
colour schemes, music and a bunch of other specifics. I went home that
evening, incorporated all the changes, and to my surprise the end product
actually looked a lot better than earlier. That edit took 12 more hours, and
became the pilot episode of the show.

When I watch it now, I feel a certain sense of accomplishment knowing that I
handled all the stages of production entirely by myself. It instils confidence in
me to know that I could do this for a living, on my own, without any outside
help. However, I have a strong background in television production –
especially in the music industry – and I have developed a fine taste for good
audiovisual content. I would go so far as to say that I’m quite pleased with the
final output, but some aspects of the final product would’ve turned out a lot
differently with help from experts in certain areas.

I am a creative producer, whose responsibility it is to ensure that the content
is engaging and in tune with the channel’s target audience. However, a
producer rarely edits or handles camera or lights himself, all of which I had to
do for this show. Maybe with an editor or a light man or sound engineer the

	
  

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pilot would look a lot more refined. However, the idea of the pilot is to give a
potential investor an idea of what it is that I have in mind with regards to this
show, and in those terms, I think I’ve done a fairly good job.

Next Steps
As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to continue working on the show either as an
external consultant or creative producer employed with a channel. My goal is
to keep discovering independent acts from India and around the globe, pair
similar genres and styles, and create opportunities for budding talent to come
together and create
music that independent markets across the world will take notice of.

One of my dreams is to take the show to London or New York. A lot of the
independent music that I listen to currently comes from these cities, and I’ve
already envisioned collaborations between specific Indian and international
musicians that I think would yield very good results. Moreover, through the
show Indian talent gets recognition abroad and international talent here in
India, and thus both markets open up to each other more than ever. With the
Indian live music industry growing faster than ever I believe now would be a
good time to introduce the show to the market and increase the inflow of
foreign talent. At the same time it would bolster the domestic careers of Indian
musicians to have international gigs to their credit.

And finally, I hope to make the ATWIID portal a hub for indie music
connoisseurs to discuss their favourite acts, have conversations about the

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scene, interact with artistes themselves, and discover new talent. Also, all
original music created on the show will be up for download here, which opens
up monetisation opportunities for featured musicians. ATWIID will pay all its
featured musicians, and attempt to bring an end to the practice of inviting
bands to perform for free in the futile hopes of getting some ‘exposure’ in their
initial years.

Contribution To The Profession/ Discipline
In terms of video content that features independent music and emerging
musicians, a lot has been done prior to this show. Moreover, considering the
fact that the show is sponsor-backed, the business model isn’t a first of its
kind either. However, what’s unique about ATWIID is the fact that it brings
Indian independent talent overseas and pits them right alongside the best
indie talent in the world. From what I’ve noticed about the Indian indie market
– living in Europe over the past one year – a lot of youngsters seem to be
aware of the fact that India has a fast-emerging indie music
scene. However, very few really listen to the music and even fewer actually
follow Indian artistes. This show will leverage the social media reach of its
featured artistes, and fans of one artiste will discover the work of the other
artiste featured on the episode. Thus, someone watching the episode for, say,
UK-based act Little People will discover the music of Indian artiste Your Chin
if they collaborate on a song. Moreover, through innovative product
placements and brand integrations more advertising opportunities will open
up, which means more revenue for the show. For instance, just in the first
episode Kareem is seen DJ-ing on a Numark turntable, wearing an Adidas t-

	
  

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shirt and drinking Amstel beer, and Carl is seen using a pair of Vic Firth drum
sticks.

With the world converging on the Internet and all music coming together on
one platform, I think now is the right time to take this music abroad and
present it to the world in the way that they would like to see it – from the
perspective of the indie musicians they admire. Potentially, if the show’s
syndication to other territories throws up favourable results the show’s rights
could be acquired by another country who could then have a local version of
the show, featuring their artistes alongside other international indie talent.

Additionally, very few documentary-style shows currently are shot with two
crews. While this might increase production expenses, it significantly lowers
the pressure on one crew, thus contributing to lesser stress and a better final
product.

Impact On Professional Development
Working on this show over the past few months has taught me many things.
First and foremost, the importance of only bringing together artistes who are
comfortable working with each other. Carl and Kareem were extremely at
ease in each others’ company, and this showed off in their professional and
personal chemistry, which
translated into good content on screen. With artistes who aren’t in similar
mental zones it is difficult to get a vibe going, which is very evident on screen.
Also, both times that I planned the shoot I put off the interviews for last, which

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in the end I realised I shouldn’t have. Not that it affected the final episode in
any way, but just doing the interviews first would’ve saved me a lot of time in
deciding what other content to shoot with the artistes. A very commonly used
editing style involves showing images or footage relevant to what is being
spoken about in the background, and while I employed this style to good
effect, having an interview script to go by while shooting other parts would’ve
significantly helped.

Professional content creators rely on shoot schedules all the time, in order to
save money and time. However, most of the times they make provision for
unforeseen obstacles, and manage to get the desired end result without much
damage. In my case, I was aware of all the potential difficulties I might face in
achieving my end goal, but I wasn’t as thoroughly prepared as I thought I was
to easily overcome these difficulties. At the back of my mind I always knew
that Joao and Niko might back out any time if the shoot schedules hinder their
school work. While they didn’t back out, the plan with them fell through
anyway, and I didn’t have a backup for almost a couple of weeks after that. It
would’ve been prudent to have options figured out beforehand, and this is
something I wish to ensure happens when the show’s being produced for
television.

Working with artistes is always a bittersweet experience. Almost all musicians
are highly sensitive people and, more often than not, very self conscious. One
might think that dealing with musicians is akin to dealing with actors in the
sense that you direct them in a way that you think works for the show and

	
  

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they follow. However, both Carl and Kareem had very intelligent suggestions
to offer in terms of content, and I made it a point never to dictate ideas.
Instead, we had open meetings where I
pitched my ideas, they told me how they could add to it, and we moved
forward with each other’s help. Often times I didn’t agree with something that
either of them had to say, but since they seemed most comfortable doing it
their way, I went ahead with it anyway.

Sticking to schedules is another big part of shooting a show, and while it
almost never happens that a shoot is delayed because of a crewmember, it is
almost just as certain that at some point, an artiste will cause some snags in
keeping up with time. I tried my best to schedule all shoots in accordance with
Kareem and Carl’s calendars, but on some occasions something
unanticipated came up and they had to cancel a shoot. Other times there
were insignificant delays, but thankfully, nothing too grave.

Overall, to a certain extent it was disappointing that I couldn’t gather a crew
for this – perhaps if I’d conceptualised the show early enough and run it by
some of my classmates who were interested in pursuing a career in music
video production – I could’ve had people help with cameras, lights and sound.
However, seeing as how I managed to put together an entire show without
much outside help has really instilled a newfound confidence in me, and I
have now begun to trust my abilities as a creative producer for music
television.

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I sincerely hope the show is liked by everyone, and this experience helps me
professionally and personally in the future.

Bibliography
Lynda.com. 2012. “Narrative Scene Editing With Premiere Pro” accessed
June 21, 2014. http://www.lynda.com/Premiere-Pro-tutorials/Narrative-SceneEditing-Premiere-Pro/112420-2.html

Smith, Clyde. 2013. “7 Tips From Fulltime Indie Musicians On Making A Living
In Music” accessed June 21, 2014. http://hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/12/7tips-from-fulltime-indie-musicians-on-making-a-living-in-music.html

Imaging Resource. 2013. “Canon T3i review” accessed June 22, 2014.
http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/T3I/T3IVIDEO.HTM

Laananen, Robin. 2006. “How To Shoot A Band Live Show” accessed June
22, 2014. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Shoot-A-Band-Live-Show/

	
  

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