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I went through every single one of your music video submissions this round — 32 in total. The video came out long because I'm walking through a lot of them, but I only stopped to record a response when I had something specifically teachable to point to. That way nobody has to sit through "yeah, that was cool" 14 times. If yours didn't make the cut, it doesn't mean it was a bad video. It means I didn't have a teachable angle on it. The reason this exists is to build a pool of knowledge for the whole community, not to grade individual songs.

Let's get into it.

I don't know if this was built with VideoBolt, some kind of AI generation, or custom work. Doesn't matter for the lesson. This is a song alive with vibrant colors when I hear it, but the video is cold and dead in its palette. Sometimes a contradiction between song and visual lands — a bright song against a muted treatment can work. Here it doesn't. The video feels like it's working against the song instead of with it.

A great director friend of mine, who keeps swearing he'll come on here and walk you through how he plans a music video, has a whole list of questions he asks every band before a shoot. One of his big ones is what colors they hear in the music. Some people genuinely hear color in their songs. That's not woo-woo, that's a real planning tool, and it would have caught this dissonance before it got committed to the edit.

Chris ran $600 in Google ads through Blossom Agency, who I recommended on a private call. He's also become friends with the Blossom team, which I love.

The smart move on the video itself was including a roster of goth model Instagram influencers in the cast, listing every one of them in the description. 29K views and counting. This is community building turned into clout bombing — each of those tagged people gets to share "oh my god, I'm in a video with [tagged influencer]," which starts its own discussion in their networks and turns the video into a go-to event. If anything, my only note as an editor would be that it leans almost too hard into goth touchstones — it's borderline a goth lexicon — but for the audience this is built for, that's a feature. Excellent execution.