At the end of 2013, as I was asked to help manage London band Panic Island [defunct], myself and Creative Art Director Nanda Marth came up with a project for lead singer and lyricist Arron Sans and guitarist Vinnie Shimia to raise awareness to their and while connecting with listeners in a fun and interactive way.

It was simple: the guys were going to write love songs for people based on their respective stories and we were going to shoot a video for each as Valentine’s Day gifts.

We started by asking friends and family for their own stories while sharing teaser posters around London and the internet world directing audiences to the temporary website http://www.yoursongproject.co.uk.

The biggest challenge we had was the lack of funds at the time, so we allocated a small budget to purchase props for the videos as well as some for printing and mailing.

We designed Valentine’s Day cards which were sent to a number of journalists in the UK and US as well as contacting others via email, especially in Brazil, where Vinnie is from and where we managed to get newspaper coverage of the project.

Soon we were receiving requests from all over the globe, from the Pacific Northwest to Australia.

The project was very well-received and the band released their first EP shortly after that receiving praise from Q magazine and culminating in a sold out show at Camden’s iconic venue Barfly (now Camden Assembly) in partnership with the MAMA Group.

It was a really fun project to work on and pretty successful considering it was our first and we had virtually no budget.

Were we to do it again, I would suggest giving a longer lead time and allocating advertising budget on social media (which wasn’t as common and available as it is nowadays in 2021).