Indie hip-hop/electronic artist plus Fresno creative production studio equals…whaaa?
Over the last two years, we’ve been lucky enough to foster a great working relationship with local artists. One such artist is Sahab, a Fresno-based musician. He wrote the theme song for a web series of ours and has provided demo tracks for reels we’ve created as well.
In December of 2012, Sahab came to us and asked if we would be interested in collaborating on a music video project of sorts. He wanted to get people fired up about the release of his new album, 11:59, but he wasn’t interested in just making music videos.
What a great opportunity to create something neither commercial or corporate long form video! Over the course of a few months we worked out the script for a six-part web series sharing the themes of the album, but shying away from just acting out lyrics from the songs.
Since we had very little time to shoot all six episodes, it was imperative that we streamline the production as much as possible. We were able to shoot multiple scenes in the same house and re-dress the set to look like a different location each time. Also, we called in every favor in the book and shot for 40 hours that weekend. Yeah. We don’t recommend that, but the results are undeniable.
We began editing the footage a few months later and the collaboration with Sahab continued. He began producing tracks for the individual episodes. By using tracks and lines from his songs and rearranging them with new material, Sahab created a score for the series that contained parts of 11:59, but custom fit the webisodes with new musical content.
The result is a six-part web series that enhances and elevates the music video. The episodes were released weekly by Sahab on his website, iamsahab.com, and succeeded in engaging his fans in the lead up to the launch of the album at Strummer’s in Fresno.
For us, it was great getting the opportunity to stretch our creative muscles without any constraints. For Sahab, it was great having a local film company take an interest in his work and utilize all their resources in helping to tell his story. And that is always a win-win situation.
To watch the entire web series, visit: youtube.com/iamsahab.
