Storylab Production · Artists, bands & labels 106,000 songs go up today. Yours is one of them, and story is what decides which ones anyone comes back to.
We make the films that turn listeners into fans. Music videos, documentary series, tour and live films. Twenty-five years, 120+ music videos, close to a billion views.
What changes is how much room the story gets, not whether it needs one. We make all three, built on the same structure, so the thing that makes people watch is the same whichever one you're paying for.
The one that has to work cold, on a feed, in front of someone who has never heard your name. One idea, one turn, and your name still attached when the song ends.
Three to five parts that let people meet the person behind the record. Streams are rented from a platform. This is the part you own. It's the reason someone follows you into the next release.
What actually happened out there, cut so the people who weren't in the room wish they had been. It works on promoters and label rooms as hard as it works on fans.
Format is a decision about how much room your story needs. It's never a decision about whether it needs one.
An indie band with a campfire and two tin cans, a rock song that found a country it had never played in, an artist in the middle of a very public split, and a tribute nobody ever wanted to make. Same structure underneath every one. A real before, a real turn, a real after.
A campfire, a length of twine and two tin cans. Made in 2010 for close to nothing, and still played at weddings fifteen years later. The comments are full of people who walked down an aisle to it. The idea did the work. The budget never came into it.
A Sydney band's song, handed a second life when a Korean drama put it in front of a continent that had never heard of them. Read the comments and you are watching a fanbase arrive in real time. The song never changed. The story around it did. That is the whole argument of this page.
Filmed two weeks before the divorce went public, with the story already being fought out in the press. We made the call to keep the other side of it off camera entirely. What we stayed with was Morgan, and how he was actually carrying it away from the stage. Five parts, a quarter of a million views, and a comment section full of people meeting him properly for the first time.
The next single, cut from a year of touring. The same story carried into a different form, so the release landed on an audience that already knew what it was about. One of the top comments names the director, which almost never happens under a music video.
Kids running wild through a forest, shot like a memory rather than a performance. It is still the film people reach for when they are trying to explain what the band feels like. It is still bringing new listeners in more than a decade after it was posted.
The video the band released after Johann ‘Yogi’ Ofner died during the making of it. A tribute to their friend, and to the young daughter he left behind. The shows that followed raised more than $40,000 for her. Nothing about it was made to sell anything, and it is still the clearest thing we can show anyone about what a film is able to carry.
Views are easy to quote and easy to fake. The only number that means anything is how many people changed their mind. Every line here is real, from under the six films above. Every one of them is somebody who arrived a stranger.
Wow I just thought Morgan was a good looking country singer who was married to a more famous country singer. He shines through with this side of him being simply himself. There is an honest chill talented loving guy who just happens to sing country music shown in this short film. I really like him, his music and his candor.
I accidentally came across the song last night and I was awestruck. I'd never heard of these before yet I became a fan within 10 seconds. What a totally stunning song and those vocals are like melting butter on hot toast
This song really moves me but breaks my heart as I can relate to the emotions. I discovered you through "Uncontrollably Fond" Korean drama. Thank you both. I gained some strength to keep living.
My wife and I have only recently discovered this great band! We went to see them live in Manchester just on Feb 17th. They were fabulous! This is one of my favourites now but can't believe it's over 12 years old! It just shows that you can keep rediscovering great music!
I just discovered you and your talents. You have a great tone in your voice. The top things I look for in an artist is storytelling ability and stirring feelings. You have both... I will listen to everything you put out from now on.
Isn't it wonderful when you find a band you have never heard before and you find you totally love them? Sometimes you hear a song that you really like, so you check out the artist and end up being disappointed. You cannot say that about The Paper Kites... Featherstone was the first track I listened to.
i will never forget the first time this was played in uncontrollably fond. idk but i cried so much and i never searched for a song so fast
Was nice to get to know who you are. I listen to your music but never knew where you were from. Great documentary.
I saw The Paper Kites open for City and Colour. Everyone wants the openers to be done quickly, but these guys changed my mind. The female singer's voice is out of this world. I really enjoyed them and I still remember their performance 12 years later.
That was touching. I've never heard of the man, but nonetheless, it hit deep. It shows that there is light when the community can come together to give live for an individual who is lost.
i thought they disband already? i love this band and this song! please stay forever and make lot of good song. new fan here
Saw you at Put in bay last year September 2022 had no idea what you was going through! We love you, you're an amazing person! Don't let someone's bad intentions make you hard!
This was the number one song listened to on my brothers playlist before he died, even though he was into rap, but now I can see why it was
This was amazing to watch and hear. I know how I felt through my divorce. I lived in someone's shadow and needed to realize I mattered just as much. This is a beautiful song, one I cried through for you. It's grief, absolutely. Just know you're not alone.
Everyone talking about Uncontrollably fond in the comments, me who came here cause of Felix and now I am in love with the song
I listened to this a lot when I was pregnant and once I had my baby I realized it was the only song that would calm him. This song is so special to me, we listen to it every night when I rock him to sleep.
This is peak Australian male, say something nice and heartfelt and then it's just like "oh...thanks mate"
What a band! Just discovered this group by chance and I am so delighted to have found them. Their music is beautiful.
Thank you for telling us your side of everything. This series was so genuine and you seem so down to earth. Thank you for putting into words how I have felt after heartbreak.
I love the music but this video is something special. To come up with the idea of filming you tour as you tour the world makes it so special. It is beautiful. Hats off to your director Peter John! The tour was wonderful to see since most of us would never see some of these places.
106,000 new tracks are delivered to streaming services every day. There are 253 million of them sitting there now, and 88% will get fewer than a thousand plays this year. Two tenths of one percent of that catalogue takes half of all the listening on earth.
Nobody in that pile is failing on quality. They're failing on reason. Your song has three seconds to explain why a stranger should stay, and a good song on its own has never been able to do that. It needs somewhere to have come from.
You aren't competing with other artists. You're competing with indifference.
Not because the people are lazy or the budget isn't there. Because of six things nobody says out loud on a release call. Every one of them is upstream of the camera.
Single, then a video, then a lyric video, then a live take, then the album. Six deliverables and no arc between any of them. Every date on the calendar gets filled and nothing anyone can retell comes out the other end.
Mood board, location, wardrobe, grade. Nobody in the room was ever asked what the film is about. So it becomes a film about an artist standing somewhere nice, and it dies the week it drops.
More clips, more trends, more of the same face. It fills a feed, it builds nothing, and it is quietly exhausting for the one person who has to be in every single frame of it.
The most valuable thing you own is the real version of what happened. Almost nobody films it, because it feels self-indulgent. An audience doesn't read that as modesty. It reads as distance, and it keeps them at streaming range.
Playlist adds and first-week numbers are quarterly. A fanbase is a decade. The work that builds one rarely shows up anywhere on the campaign report, so it rarely gets funded.
Years of rooms, drives, breakdowns and reunions, none of it shot as a story. Then a reason to tell it turns up. A milestone, a comeback, a documentary offer. And most of it is already gone.
None of that is a budget problem. It's a story problem. The story is the part we do first.
Four numbers from four completely unrelated places. A streaming report, a fan-spend study, a Netflix drama and an eBay experiment. All of them are measuring the same thing.
Get someone lost in a story and their own world goes briefly quiet. Their attitudes shift further than any argument can move them. Green & Brock, 2000. It is the same state a great record puts someone in, which is why the two stack.
A character in real struggle releases oxytocin, the neurochemical behind empathy and generosity. In Paul Zak's lab, viewers who felt a father's story gave away part of their own earnings. Fans do the same thing. They just call it merch.
During a well-told story, the listener's brain activity synchronises with the teller's. Hasson, Princeton. Nothing about a well-lit performance shot does that, no matter what it cost to light.
Katy Perry: Part of Me was sold as a film. It was a campaign, and it barely tried to hide it. AEG Live helped produce it, and they were the promoter of the very tour it was filming. A golden ticket was slipped inside the Teenage Dream reissue. Pepsi ran a co-branded push around the premiere. Perry described it herself as closing the chapter on that album. Critics called it sharp brand management, and they were right.
It also took $32.7 million against a $13.2 million budget and became the fifth highest-grossing concert film ever made.
Millions of people bought a ticket to watch the marketing. That is the whole difference between a story and an ad. One gets skipped. The other gets paid for.
A film with a real before, a real turn and a real after is the exact arc that triggers all three responses at once. It's the reason a campfire and two tin cans out-performed a decade of expensive videos, and it's why the shape has to be found before anything is shot. It's a process, not a gift, and it's the process every film we make is built on.
Sources: Luminate, 2025 Year-End Music Report (upload volume and stream distribution); Luminate super-fan research, US (fan spend); Spotify data reported July 2022 and Fortune/CBS (Kate Bush, Running Up That Hill); Walker & Glenn, Significant Objects (narrative and value); Green & Brock 2000 (narrative transportation); Zak, Claremont (oxytocin and narrative); Hasson, Princeton (speaker–listener neural coupling); Box Office Mojo and Paramount (Part of Me). The mechanism is real. We build to trigger it on purpose.
Producer, director, filmer and editor. Twenty-five years and more than 120 music videos, and a RED Digital Cinema trainer and ambassador. A billion views and millions of comments. A bucket load of data on what works and what doesn't when it comes to creating stories that reach and transform.
Storylab Production is that process, pointed at your release. A small, senior crew who have spent two decades on tour buses, not a department of account managers.
04. What we make Every one of them has a real before, a real turn and a real after. The shape is the product, whether it runs three minutes or five parts. We find the story in what you're actually living through first, then build everything else around it.
We come in and find it. Conversations with you and the people around you, the songs, and the arc that decides everything downstream. You approve the shape before a single camera is booked.
A small crew and cinema cameras, built so you forget it's there. Usually a day or two, and often folded into dates and rooms you were already playing.
Cutting for the hook. The first seconds decide whether anyone stays, the middle decides whether they believe you, and the finish decides whether they send it to somebody else.
The hero film, plus the cutdowns that go to work. Socials, pre-save, press, sync and tour marketing. One properly directed shoot becomes a campaign instead of a post.
A stream is a rental. Someone who knows what a song cost you buys the ticket, the record and the shirt. And brings someone with them next time.
Context is what makes an old track findable again. A film is the most durable context you can attach to one, and it goes on working long after the release week.
Send the film. Promoters, labels, sync supervisors and press all decide in the first thirty seconds anyway, and a film makes that decision for them.
Hero film, cutdowns, socials, press assets, tour visuals. Fewer things made properly, instead of a calendar nobody on your team can keep up with.
It only exists because we were in the room when it happened. No competitor, no AI and no stock library can produce a second of it.
The years you're living through right now are the ones a documentary will want in ten. Filmed properly, they're an asset. Left on a phone, they're gone.
Start a project Tell us what's coming and what you need people to understand about it. We'll come back with the story shape we'd build, what it takes to make it, and what it costs.
It depends on scope. One video or a whole release, how many days on the ground, and how far we travel. Tell us what you're putting out and what you need it to do below, and we'll come back with the shape we'd build and a straight number, not a range.
Bloom was a campfire, a piece of twine and two tin cans, and it has done more than most six-figure videos ever will. What costs money is crew, days and travel. What makes a film work is the idea, and finding that is the first thing we do, before anyone prices a shoot.
That's usually the best way to do it. Most of what we shoot for artists happens on dates you're already playing, in rooms you're already in, which is why a series often costs less than people assume. Send us the routing and we'll tell you where it makes sense to join you.
No. The honest version of a story is not the same as the most exposed version of it, and knowing the difference is most of the job. On Over For You we left an entire side of a very public split off camera on purpose, and it is the reason people trusted it.
You do. The hero film, every cutdown and the masters. No licensing clock, no fee to keep using your own story. If there's a label or distributor in the mix we'll paper it however your deal needs it.
Yes, and with artists directly too. We're used to sitting between an artist, a manager and a marketing team, and to delivering against a release date rather than around one.
Yes. Storylab also runs a hands-on workshop for bands, artists and labels that hands your team the same process, which suits acts who are already filming on the road and want it to actually land. See /storylab/bands.
Between the Sunshine Coast, Melbourne and Carlsbad, California, and wherever the tour goes. Tell us where you are and we'll tell you straight whether it's worth flying.
