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King Iso Ghetto Psycho Signing.jpg

Ghetto Psycho
by King Iso

Case Study

Project/Role Overview

Position: Full-Time Employee

Role: Social Content Creator & Behind-the-Scenes Videographer
Company: Strange Music Inc. / King Iso
Date & Duration: April - October 2022​

Summary

I created six types of content for Ghetto Psycho’s singles and album release: Coming Soon, Out Now, BTS, and Lyric Videos, along with platform-specific content like Spotify Canvases and YouTube Audio Videos.

Context & Problem

King Iso is one of Strange Music’s top artists, touring alongside Tech N9ne and E-40. Ghetto Psycho is his 9th album release and needed a push that matched Strange Music’s high production standards. This rollout required four distinct content types, produced consistently across 6 singles and 4 music videos over 7 months. This level of output can be a lot to maintain without becoming too repetitive or predictable.

Role & Responsibilities

  • Filmed behind the scenes on set during all 4 music videos, capturing the artists, crew, Strange Music’s facilities, and various set locations.

  • Filmed and photographed on set during the cover art photo shoot, capturing content for Spotify Canvases and Behind the Scenes while the freelance photographer handled the cover art stills.

  • Produced custom Coming Soon promos, Out Now promos, Behind the Scenes mini-docs, Spotify Canvases, YouTube Audio Videos, and lyric videos using the cover art, footage I recorded, and assets from media libraries.

  • Designed a custom and cohesive look in brand with the cover art using King Iso’s face, the Nebraska Butcher knife, and blood splatter.

The Process

Branded Content

  • Strange Music hired a freelance photographer to capture stills for the Ghetto Psycho cover art while I handled the Spotify Canvases and BTS at the same time.

  • Working alongside the photographer, I let him take priority on the set so I could capture what King Iso and the photographer were doing.

  • Between setups and wardrobe changes, I would capture footage for the Spotify Canvases.

  • I focused on capturing slow motion footage, close-up macro shots, and full body shots.

  • I shot footage for the Canvases with an eye towards reusing the footage for promotional material later on so we could get more mileage out of each shot.​

Branded Content | Ghetto Psycho by King Iso

Branded Content | Ghetto Psycho by King Iso

​Butcher Knife Elements

  • The final version of the cover art featured a butcher knife in the shape of Nebraska, King Iso’s home state, which I used as a repeated element in the promotional material.

  • For some of the canvases, I took a photo of a vinyl record, changed the label color to red, added small butcher knives around the outer border of the label, took the photo into After Effects, rotated it 360 degrees twice, and framed a few different perspectives of the knife looking like it is spinning in place as the record spins.

  • I also used the butcher knife as a texture layer by taking the knife from the Photoshop file and creating a black-and-white 3000x3000 repeating grid in Illustrator, which I brought into DaVinci Resolve to create seamless loops.

  • I took the loops and layered them using different composite settings with footage of paper, blood splatter, and film grain to design a custom look for each promo asset.

  • I created a custom adjustment layer, which made the assets have dark contrast and glowing halation.

  • I combined all these elements to build out the promotional asset library, including lyric videos.

Spotify Canvases | Ghetto Psycho by King Iso

Spotify Canvases | Ghetto Psycho by King Iso

Lyric Videos

  • For the lyric videos, I animated each word to come on screen in sync with the lyrics in the song.

  • To keep things consistent, I used the same fonts that were used in the cover art.

  • I created simple audio videos featuring each song, the cover art, and a background that expands on the universe of the cover art.

  • For the YouTube Audio videos, I used the Ghetto Psycho cover art and a photo of a white wall and added blood splatter over it in post.

Lyric Videos | Ghetto Psycho by King Iso

Lyric Videos | Ghetto Psycho by King Iso

Solution & Deliverables

  • 18 Coming Soon promos

  • 25 Out Now promos

  • 5 BTS mini-docs (four music videos plus the cover art photoshoot)

  • 6 Lyric videos

  • 20 Spotify Canvases

  • 20 YouTube Audio Videos

Results & Impact

  • The content I produced reached a wide audience across King Iso’s, Strange Music’s, and other collaborators’ profiles like E-40 – The Crash Out BTS video alone has 27k plays

  • This was my first time capturing multi-use footage, and it paid off – the Canvas footage ended up in over 80% of the promotional content, which saved us days and possibly weeks of additional shooting, since King Iso lives in Omaha.

Reflection

The biggest win of this whole project was the dual-use footage captured for the Spotify Canvases. The workflow was great, as the photographer and I took turns capturing what we needed. In the future, I will take more notes on what I capture and how many usable clips I recorded, along with knowing exactly how many songs I would be needing to create assets for. At the time we did the shoot, we didn’t know how many songs we would be putting out, which made planning the shoot more difficult. Beyond the Canvases, the promotional content taught me just as much.

For the promotional content, I’m happy I had so much creative freedom on these assets because I could create something like the butcher knife texture layer, which felt unique and interesting. Some troubles bubbled up when it came to scheduling and communicating the necessary elements of the assets. Since then, we have implemented asset request forms to clarify what is expected in the edits, like song choice, duration, video type, and delivery date. Lyric videos proved to be the most difficult because you need to animate each word independently. After creating so many assets, I’ve found an efficient workflow inside of DaVinci Resolve that expedites the process.

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