Who is Axel Hayes?

Axel Hayes is a 23-year-old wannabe rockstar. He was raised in a quaint but affluent area of Houston, TX, with wealthy parents that indulged his wishes to pursue music. At age 22, he was signed on to a famous record label, and a few months later released his first single: Sail. Now, he proudly promotes his music video, his upcoming shows, and his merch store that includes a collab with Adidas. Yet, Axel Hayes is not a real person. Instead, he was created from scratch as part of our Media Marketing project. 

We began the process of creating Axel Hayes by first selecting a song to present as his debut single. Given the choice between blues-rock, grunge, and alternative-rock options, we chose AWOLNATION's "Sail." This alt-rock song has a dark, gritty vibe that is furthered by its edgy lyricism ("Maybe I should cry for help / Maybe I should kill myself"). We knew that this song's tempo and it's symbolic lyrics would facilitate the storyboarding and editing process, and we knew that it was catchy and easy to market online. Once the song was selected and approved, the logical next step was to storyboard the music video. 

The song's aggressive lyrics and dark feel left me with no question that we should incorporate violence into the MV.  When researching similar rock bands, such as Papa Roach, we noticed that they promote and embrace the aggression of rock music.  I worked with the lyric "This is how I show my love" to create a storyline of a young man whose girlfriend broke up with him, and he sought revenge on the new boyfriend. Although we all agreed on the plot progression, we threw around different ideas and came up with a video that started as our protagonist woke up and went about his day.  Littered throughout the production would be flashbacks, and we would differentiate the changing scenes by implementing colors. At first I planned to execute these changes in color using my friend's HMI panel LED lights, but the idea fell through.  Instead, I plan to use overlay filters to lightly change the saturation and hue in post.

After some discussion, we decided to rework the storyboard.  This was likely the most stressful portion, as we each had different ideas of what to do.  However, we divided into two groups, and half of us remade the storyboard while the other half worked on the Google Slides presentation. By the end of the third day, we had come up with a simpler and shorter outline for the video, and we developed our artist and his motivations.  We decided that Juan would be best suited to play Axel, and we took a picture of him that I later edited in PicsArt and used to make a mock website.  Using Canva, I was able to make logo designs that I later edited on to clothes, and compiled that to the make the “Store” section of the website. 

Ultimately, I’m really happy with the result.  The next step right now is to set up an Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok and begin posting. We want to make some sort of TikTok trend (perhaps a meme relating to the lyrics “This is how I show my love” or “Maybe I’m a different breed”) to take full advantage of the app’s hold on the music industry.  We also plan on filming the MV this weekend, and taking behind-the-scenes photos for Axel’s social media.

So far, one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced has been distributing the workload and finding time outside of school to record.  We need to work hard to keep on schedule, and we plan on having everything recorded by the end of the month in order to have time to edit and add any final touches.