Tag Archives: music

Street Studios – NAMM PSA

Last year Death Cookie was contracted to create, produce, shoot, and edit a Public Service Announcement for The NAMM Foundation. We teamed up with Found Sound Nation which was hosting 12 Street Studios during Make Music New York on International Make Music Day (June 21st).
We’d decided to focus on three of the locations and setup a Cinematographer (Tate MacDowell, Ora Dekornfeld and Jesse Brown) at each Street Studio. Each team of Music Producers was tasked with making an original track by the end of the day to be presented at an afterparty. However for the final PSA, we hand selected Lorna Dune and Keith Sweaty to create and original score using the samples that were created from the general public at those three locations to create one piece. The challenge was to make a final piece that allowed the audio to meld with the video. It was a team effort between Keith and Lorna and DCE Producer/Editor Tate MacDowell and took over 8 months to complete.
We hope that it inspires people to #JustPlay !

What Music Means To Me: NAMM Museum Of Making Music Exhibit

This past November marked the opening of the “What Music Means To Me” exhibit at the NAMM Museum Of Making Music. I was asked to create a short documentary that would accompany the photography of Richard Rejino.

Pretty cool to be able to say my work is in a museum!
Here’s the video in full…

Here’s what you’ll see at the museum. Go check it out and share what #MusicMeans to you!

Public Service Announcements for The NAMM Foundation

I was recently contacted by The NAMM Foundation with an interesting and unconventional approach to their yearly PSA Campaigns.

They’d told me that all of the footage had been shot during an event in NYC called “Make Music New York” and was already compiled into a 12min video for NPR Music titled “What Happens When 350 Musicians Meet For The First Time? ‘100+ BPM'”

I’d edited commercial work in the past, but normally it’s commissioned, conceived, shot and then edited (all by one production company.) In this case it was already shot and NAMM believed that the footage had potential to deliver a message. I came up with a few different versions of titles that seemed to convey why this footage was so powerful. When I first looked at it, the coolest thing about it was how many different walks of life had been brought together to play music. It had an amazing sense of community and music was possibly the only tie that could bring all of these different people together.

After creating a Proof Of Concept, we contacted NPR Music and acquired the rights to the footage along with a no graphics master of their edit along with the music rights to Red Baraat’s composition.
It’s only now that I’ve realized that working together didn’t stop when this song ended on June 21st, 2014. It carried straight through the post-production process of this PSA and allowed us to collaborate with musicians and producers we’d never have otherwise.

In the first month since distributing the PSAs, they’ve already earned nearly $300,000 in free Television airtime having aired 2100 times. They’ll run nationwide in Spanish and English along with the number one TV station in Brazil for the upcoming year.

DIY: Royalty Free Music

Let’s face it, licensing music is a pain in the butt.
As a Producer, you’re typically prepared to put in the leg work of licensing and buying a few tracks to highlight your action montage. But, no one really wants to do that for background instrumentals. After all, you’re planning on putting voice overs and interview audio on top of that song anyway.
Well, I’ve recently come across a great solution.
I created this song in a few minutes, check out the youtube video…

Here’s link to a few other songs on my sound cloud account.

Sonos At Home: Andrew Scheps

Here’s another one of the Sonos commercials that I’ve been working on with Producer Jamie Tierney. Jamie and I have worked together for years, but mostly on surf commercials and films.
I can’t wait to see what talented musician/producer we get to feature next in this series!