I just got done doing a two week, sales road show grind. We rented an RV, and took to the streets with the product, serving food and delivering demonstrations and even had a petting zoo where the geeks could actually touch the computers.

(those things use a LOT of gas! It's almost like you could have a hole in the tank, just pouring gas out on the road and you would never know)

Anyway, we've got a bunch of photos and basically want to produce a road trip video for simple hype reasons.

The target demo is corporate types, 35-50. Some East coasters in the mix too. Mostly male, engineering sales and marketing types.

Probably will be a 4-8 minute production, mostly stills from the trip, some audio clips, some power point graphic slides to convey statistics.

Playlist suggestions?

Looking for some tunes that sort of say "road trip", "Cool", "Adventure" and "Success".

I'll mix and blend the tunes to tie the crap they give me together and create the message out of it.

Nothing extreme, nothing boring.


Ideas?

Richard Burmer. These 2 cds are recommended: Mosaic (1984), Bhakti Point (1987). Kind of a contemporary fits-nearly-everything instrumental music. Quite good too.

from wiki: Richard was born September 19, 1955 in Owosso, Michigan, the son of Henry S. and Theresa (Suchozenka) Burmer. As a youth growing up in Michigan, he was introduced to the music of India, the Mid-East, contemporary orchestral composers, and electronic music. He found a wide pallet of musical textures with synthesizers, and the original sampler, the Mellotron. Influences also came from the Moody Blues, King Crimson, and Pink Floyd. He graduated from Corunna High School.

After spending time in college studying music theory and composition, Richard moved to Los Angeles where he became a sound designer for E-mu Systems in Santa Cruz and engineer/synth programmer for EFX systems in Burbank.

Richard Burmer died on Saturday, September 9, 2006 in Saginaw at the age of 50 years of heart disease.

If you are using copyrighted music to promote a product without permission, you're legally on shaky ground. More so if the end product is posted on the www for downloading by anyone.

For example, the college I work for has ASCAP and BMI licenses that would allow the campus cable TV station to broadcast CDs over Comcast. However, if copyrighted music is synchronized with video in any kind of production, permission must be obtained from the copyright holder(s) and possibly royalties paid. The only other way around this is to buy a library of royalty-free generic production music, or pay a production house that has a library of "cleared" music to produce the piece.

Local radio and TV stations used to use commercial recordings behind all kinds of productions, commercials, PSAs, sports reports, etc. They don't anymore due to the legalities. The little guys who can't afford the huge royalties to use major hit songs have to use generic production music instead.

Yes, it sucks. Yes it's messy.

As Randy mentioned, you'd probably have to get permissions, but two songs come to mind right off the top of my head;

Supertramp; Hide In Your Shell

and

Alan Parsons Project; Sirius

Then again, there has to be some Stevie Ray Vaughn tune that would work!

Good luck! Post up a link to your finished product.

I'm sure it will be excellent!

If you are looking for royalty free music to use for your presentation, Internet Archive is a good place to start. Many pieces are in the public domain, but you might have to do some digging. I think Scott Joplin might be a good source of tunes.

If you had the cash to get it licensed, "Gridlock" by the Pogues would be right up your alley.

Good luck Missing!

If the legal aspect of this is a concern, I can give you free use of 10 pretty decent sounding instrumental tracks by Composure. I sorted of "produced" this CD of tracks for a movie project. Email me an address if you (or anyone else) would like a copy of this CD. If you then decide you like it, I can get the artist's clearance for you.

Good luck.

I'm not going to have to be the one to worry about licensing

The production is really about selling the value of the trip as a means to engage prospects. Highly likely to see limited distribution.

If they want to take risks, they can take risks. I've no worries at all, as I won't be distributing anything and it's a work for hire, so it's their deal, lock stock and barrel. My name won't be on the credits, so that takes care of that.

---> Thanks for the offer Skep. Appreciated. I'll hold it in reserve until I see what I get in terms of assets and art fodder. Might not be enough to get worked up over! I know I'll have to come up with some art for transitions between messages, to break up the sequence of stills, and to say stuff not contained in the stills. Just don't know what that effort is gonna look like in terms of time allotted and material to source from.

Was looking for names of tunes that said, "cool road trip, aren't you sorry you missed it!". That's a known quantity. The rest isn't just yet.

(find out next week)