In search of the Perfect Christmas video

A quick recap:

• David Graham and I wrote and, in 2013, recorded a Christmas song
• We had a nice animated video made for it, and tried the DIY approach to promoting the single for Christmas 2013…
• …without a huge amount of success
• So we spent a bit of money to hire a promoter for Christmas 2014; alas, once again without a huge amount of success!

In the last post I wrote about the whole experience back in February, I suggested that I was finished with this particular project:

“That, I think, brings the curtain down on this little project of ours. From this point on A Perfect Christmas will have to fend for itself in the musical wilderness. I retain the slim hope that some intern tasked with finding the perfect track for a movie soundtrack or Christmas advert will stumble upon it some day, rescuing it from obscurity and making David and I rich beyond our wildest dreams. Or at least recoup the money we’ve spent on recording, releasing and promoting it.“

But….with Christmas approaching again I haven’t been able to resist trying a few more things to increase the chances of the aforementioned intern stumbling upon our song at some stage. We’re not spending any more money on it, but I’m still on the lookout for places to post a link and spread the word. You never know…

Video #3

The original video has chalked up thousands of YouTube views, albeit many of them via some advertising dollars that came our way. The fact that the original video wasn’t quite finished off fully bothered us a bit, particularly when we decided to spend some money on promoting the song in 2014, which is what led us to having a second video made, very cheaply via fiverr.com, with just the song lyrics featuring.

This past weekend a musical friend posted his own Christmas song to Facebook. It’s a lovely song – worth a listen – but the video also caught my eye. He used a very early film by Georges Méliès called The Christmas Angel, now in the public domain and so free to use in this way. It’s very effective.

It just so happens that I had been thinking last week about putting together a new video for our song and was planning to revisit one of our early ideas to use some stock footage of Christmas scenes, maybe cheesy jumpers from the 1970s or suchlike. Seeing Gus’s video prompted me to search for older footage and in the end it was a search for that same director, Georges Méliès, that threw up another Christmas-themed work of his, Rêve de Noël (The Christmas Dream).

To cut a long story short, we now have a third video for A Perfect Christmas.

With a bit more time and patience on my part to get the timing just right it could be even better, but I think it works well as it is. (In case you’re interested, I edited the video using WeVideo.com.) I can’t help smiling each time the chorus starts and the guy with the violin comes goose-stepping across the stage. They must have had lots of fun making that film way back in 1900.