Before there was…

Sometimes I write things without knowing what they have the potential of becoming. Then, I let them sit there and hope that those ideas will evolve into something else. Some ideas develop into something coherent, and others just sit there, stagnant. No matter how intriguing the idea is to me, and no matter how much I want to turn it into something else, sometimes the muse just isn’t there. But because that original idea is so interesting to me, it disappoints me that I can’t share it with everyone else. So, here I am, posting one of those ideas. At the very least, I can just post it here and call it a “writing sample”.

This is a concept that was created for a company that was going to focus on distributing online educational video content for the business sector. Very quickly, the company’s focus changed and they decided to distribute more than just educational content for business. So, this concept was never presented to them.

What was this going to be exactly? I don’t know. It could have become a script. A print ad. A radio spot. Anything really. I just wrote the below prose to try to find a voice or a tone for this idea. Although the seed for it was planted during a brainstorming session with another writer, the below text is what sprouted out of my mind. For a long time, I thought I would turn it into something else. Maybe into a short film script. Or maybe a satirical novel. But to be honest, I’m not entirely sure where this idea goes from here. Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Before (company name) there was…

A boardroom of chaos. Curtains drawn shut; nary a sliver of sunlight penetrates the room. Overhead, the few remaining fluorescent bulbs flicker with disorienting irregularity. The chairs surrounding the conference table are either toppled or broken. The table’s centrepiece is a garbage can with flames and smoke billowing out of it. At the end of the table, several savage men surround their leader. These used to be rational men. Men of intelligence and nobility. Wealthy men. Proud men, reduced to a primitive, primal state. Covered in sweat, dirt and blood. Stomping; grunting; chanting.

The leader throws a handful of dried rat bones onto the table.

The primitive men speak over each other’s voices, “Oooooo… Awwww… What do they say? Yes! What does it mean?”

“It is unclear – something is missing,” their leader says.

“Yes. He’s right. Something is missing,” the primitive men bark all at once.

The primitive men pass a live chicken to each other, hand to hand, until it reaches their leader. The leader cuts the chicken’s throat and pours its blood onto the rat bones.

The leader shouts to his followers, “I see now. It all makes sense. Everything. Can you see it?”

The primitive men scream, “Yes! Yes! We can see!”

The men grunt and stomp and beat their fists on the table.

Before (company name) there was this… whatever this is.

***

Before (company name) there was…

A dark office building. Several primitive men in ratty, torn, blood stained suits run down the hallway illuminating the path with torches. They pass several offices where inside other primitive men mimic the actions of a life that once was.

A primitive man speaks into a severed phone receiver, “Sally, please pick up my dry cleaning.”

Another types at a computer without electricity. “L-O-L. T-T-Y-L”, he chuckles over the clicking keys.

Yet another stands at a broken photocopier attempting to create handmade copies on a crumpled piece of paper with a dried-out pen.

Two other primitive men stand by an empty water cooler repeating the same fragment of conversation over and over again. “They’re going back to the island, can you believe that?” the man says mechanically. “Ah, the show’s been a mess since the second season,” the other responds.

The men with torches continue down the hallway. “The shaft knows all!” the men chant as they near the end of the hall. Another group of men follow quickly behind them, laboriously carrying their leader in their up stretched arms.

Their leader screams, “My sacrifice will reveal all!”

Two primitive men pull open a set of elevator doors. Smoke, steam and flames rise up through the shaft. The primitive men throw their leader into the fiery pit; he screams as he falls to his sacrificial doom.

The primitive men cheer, “All reveal!”

Before (company name) there was this… whatever this is.

Falling Quickly For A Scene

Many of my favourite films are about music and musicians. Hard Core Logo, Almost Famous, High Fidelity, 24 Hour Party People and The Commitments probably being at the top of my list. These are films that are not only about creative people, but that are fuelled by the product of that creativity itself. Meaning that the music, and the power of the music, stands almost as tall as all the other dramatic elements within those films. Think of Almost Famous and the “Tiny Dancer” scene. Or, The Commitments and “Destination Anywhere”. Or the following scene from Once. To me, this is as near to perfect as a scene can get.

Consider the set-up: Guy, a busker, and Girl have just met. Girl wants Guy to fix her vacuum, which Guy considers a slight nuisance at first. That is, until he discovers that Girl is a musician as well. Together, they go into a music shop and she plays a piece by Mendelssohn at the piano. Then, she coaxes Guy to play one of his songs so that she can accompany him. He briefly plays the melody for her, then takes her through the chord changes and the bridge. He thinks he knows this song — he wrote it after all — but that’s about to change. Without actually speaking words to each other, these characters — who both felt off course with their lives — will influence each other in a way that no other person could have. And, it’s all because of this one perfect moment where a song becomes their song.

Writing RVLed

Most of my time is spent writing scripts for projects that you won’t get to see for years. That’s because it takes a long time to get a feature film or television project off the ground. However, I also occasionally write copy for commercials, promotional and instructional videos, as well as a variety of products that are meant for print. These are short projects, that are usually turned around quite quickly. Like the video below:

This project came to me with the concept already in place. My main role was to write the voice-over at the end. However, to ensure that the whole thing worked cohesively, I wrote the full script so that the client and the director could see beforehand how the whole piece would be paced out. This is the first in a series of videos that I’ll be writing for this client. I’ll post more as they’re completed.

Old School

When I’m annoyed by all the distractions that my laptop provides, I start to think how much more productive I might be if I wrote on a typewriter. I wouldn’t be tempted to check me email every half hour or so — because, you know, I’m an important man and people are constantly contacting me about important and urgent shit. I wouldn’t be able to creep around Facebook and see what people I haven’t talked to in over a decade had for breakfast this morning. I wouldn’t waste an hour of my time watching commercials that aired in Ontario during the 1980s (seriously, check out this Youtube channel and tell me that it’s not a complete time-suck: Retrontario). I wouldn’t be able to look anything up on Wikipedia, and therefore wouldn’t be pulled into the never-ending hyperlinked vortex of information-I’ll-never-use. But then, I think about not having a backspace or delete button, and I start to get a panic attack.

Torn

Annetenna. It took me about 0.5 seconds to realize why I’d misspelled the word while writing it into a script. There once was a band named Annetenna, comprised of the former members of a band called Ednaswap. The principal songwriter and vocalist for both bands was Anne Preven. She wrote a song called Torn, later made famous by Natalie Imbruglia. That’s the version of the song that I heard first. I never really cared for it. Then, I heard an acoustic version performed by Ms. Preven. I completely fell in love with it. I loved it so much I put it in a short film I made back at York. Its story, and the emotion conveyed in that version, ran in parallel with everything I was trying to say. It’s funny how a different interpretation can entirely change your perspective on a song.

Revving the Mind

The Code 46 score remains my all-time favorite music to write to. There are other albums that I listen to from time to time, but this one is constant. It’s my fallback when no other can help me along. It’s the ignition, the air, the spark and the fuel that set my thoughts in motion. It’s the accelerator and the brake. It’s the lubricant that prevents the gears from grinding. It provides the hum and the roar. It absorbs the bumps and the swerves. It protects me as I hurtle myself towards unknown dangers. And with it, I never feel lost.

Click here to listen to the whole album on Youtube.

30 Day Song Challenge: Abandoned at Day 30

Yes, I’m aware that in the time since my last post I could have completed another 30 days of the song challenge, but the topic for Day 30 of the challenge left me scratching my head for a while. You would think that I could remember “my favorite song at this time last year,” but I honestly couldn’t come up with anything. Sure, at some point later in the summer I was listening to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, so if I had been doing this challenge in August, I would have listed a song from that album, but since I was doing the challenge in June, I couldn’t come up with anything. Usually, for me to associate a specific song with a specific time, I need to have an event or a place that I can associate it to. And, all I can assume is that not much happened in June of 2010, because I have no idea what my favorite song was at the time. And so for the past month and a half, Day 30 has sat vacant in mind. And, since I still can’t think of anything from last June to fill it with, I’m gonna throw in a random song, for no other reason than it’s a rockin’ track that I’m listening to right now. And thus, the challenge is complete. Finally.

30 Day Song Challenge – Day 29: A Song From My Childhood

My parents gave me this album for my 5th or 6th birthday. They also gave me an imitation red leather jacket like the one from the video. My mom has a picture that proves it. If I had a copy, I’d post it here. I don’t remember if I had this music video on a VHS tape, or if I just watched it on TV a lot, but this was one of my favorite songs and videos when I was younger. It was probably my first introduction to horror. And it was definitely my first introduction to zombies. The assault on the house at the end is still frightening. This video’s influence on me cannot be measured. It’s a song by the greatest popstar of the 80s. It’s the video that set the standard for all the music videos that came after it; and to which none have lived up to. Vincent Price, Quincy Jones, John Landis, Michael Jackson — thank you!

30 Day Song Challenge – Day 28: A Song That Makes Me Feel Guilty

Well, this is certainly a strange topic. I can’t think of any songs that make feel guilty. And, even if I could think of one, I don’t think I’d want to share it with everyone. However, there are certain songs for which I feel a tinge of guilt for liking simply because I know a little about the background of the song. For example, I don’t think anyone can help but feel a bit of guilt when listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, knowing that the members of that band had to go through so much discord and heartache to create such a beautiful collection of songs. As well, there’s the following song from The Rolling Stones that gives me occasional pangs of guilt. My favorite part of this song is towards the middle when Merry Clayton’s voice cracks from singing so intensely. Recently, I read about how she actually suffered a miscarriage due to the strain of singing this song. So yeah, that’s kind of changed the way I listen to it now.

30 Day Song Challenge – Day 27: A Song I Wish I Could Play

I don’t sing. Not in front of people anyway. I don’t know why, but ever since I was kid, I never really liked it. And, even when I started to play guitar, I never bothered to develop my voice. It’s something that I really regret now. Any time I play guitar with a group of people I have to find a song that I can play and that they can sing, and that’s not always easy. If I could just sing it myself, it would make things so much more entertaining for everyone. So, today’s choice isn’t really a specific song that I would like to play, but one of many, many songs that I would like to sing if I had a decent voice. I don’t even wish that I had a great voice, just something that’s passable. I’d even settle for a nasally Greg Keelor kind of a voice.