Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Writing and Marketing with Spotify
Music is an important part of HG World. Careful listeners will hear references to songs in the dialogue, the characters and even settings throughout the show. Because I can't afford the songs I hear in my head that I think would be perfect for the soundtrack, I try to put some reference to that song in the show in the hope that it creates an earworm or that the listener picks up on the cue and imposes that song in their imagination as they listen. I don't know if that works or even makes sense, but I've been trying to figure out a way to add new music to the show and share that experience with listeners.
One thing I may try for Season Two is a "song swap" track for each episode. One scene, for example, would ROCK if it had "Welcome to the Jungle" playing underneath it. Because I can't pay $25,000 for legal rights, I might just produce a version without it, but with instructions for people who own the music (and have a music editor) to superimpose the cut they own at the timecode I'd specify. Not sure about the legality of it, but it's for private use and I think it would sound awesome. On the other hand, I see some logistical problems with that. Stay tuned.
I used to be a casual Pandora listener and kept it in the background while I wrote or revised my scripts. Pandora is pretty much Internet radio with a clever algorithm to help identify songs with similar musical elements to keep your interest. If you search for Warren Zevon or, say, "Werewolves of London" Pandora may not pull out the specific request, but may offer you something similar. I never really understood that because if I ask to hear "Excitable Boy", I don't want to hear Jackson Browne play "Lawyers in Love". On the other hand, when I pick Metallica, I can be assured of hours of screaming vocals and power chords. It's a bit of a trade-off because you have no control over the queue and can only skip over so many songs before being locked into their rotation. Of course, you have more options if you choose to subscribe to the paid service.
I tried Spotify a few months ago because it allowed me to find and queue specific songs and artists. While it misses a lot of my favorite artists (or offers covers and karaoke versions of them) it has a tremendous amount of obscure material ranging from blues and jazz to techno and whatever modem carrier signal music kids today love. Like Pandora, you can pay to remove the advertisements and a larger song library. But I'm cheap. Spotify lets me select the songs I want, skip, rewind, replay, save my playlists and share them with people. It's pretty cool.
At Farpoint, a listener asked my how I titled the episodes of HG World because they read like song titles. He couldn't find some of them. I mentioned that the titles to the main series episodes are, in fact, lyrics. I couldn't remember all of them off the top of my head, so I went back through and searched for them on Spotify.
I was surprised how many of them were online. While Spotify doesn't have a lot of Pink Floyd, it does have Roger Waters' albums, so I was able to cheat a little by subbing in decent cover versions or remakes. Musically, it doesn't always flow well ("Welcome to the Jungle" into "Thriller" doesn't quite work, but it's in episode order), but I was able to create a list of all the title songs in order and then added future episode titles and songs either referenced in the show or that WOULD appear if I had the budget to license them for the podcast. Check out the list here (and please subscribe!)
HG World: The Music
The cool thing is that your iTunes subscriptions are searchable within your Spotify environment. Because I have HG World on iTunes, I can add them to the playlist and introduce each episode by it's "title song". It requires some manual set up, but you can do it, too if you have iTunes and Spotify on the same workstation. That assumes you subscribe to HG World through iTunes, of course.
WRAG Radio: Top Tracks with Todd Rage
The Spotify playlist for Todd Rage's AM station is 11 hours of hits from the fifties to the "end of real music" in the 70s" (plus a few exceptions before and after that period) that I think of when writing the character of Todd Rage. I imagine these songs crackling out of an AM radio in the night - songs of hope and loneliness, loss and an enduring American spirit. It's got everything from Billie Holiday to The Animals. Sam Cooke, Van Morrison, the Eagles, Elvis, Waylon Jennings, Rod Stewart... touchstones from a long life listening to music. I think it's an excellent mix to play while cleaning out the garage, painting the living room, driving across eater-infested territory late at night or just hiding out and scraping beans from the last can in your pack.
I toyed with feeding Keith "Todd Rage" DeCandido with some script bumpers to thread into the WRAG-AM playlist and may still do this. It would be neat to be able to plug random reports, PSAs, commercials and even AD links into the playlist.
Dogberry's Playlist
Dogberry, as played by Lee Sands, is one of my favorite characters. He's weird, chaotic and sometimes dangerous. His tastes are scattered, so his music reflects that same weird, sometimes troubles, borderline creepy yet loveable vibe. So of course I had to add some Thunderclap Newman, Jonathan Coulton, David Bowie, They Might Be Giants, even a little Buckner & Garcia.
McInnes' In-Flight Recorder
Group Captain McInnes is one of the most popular characters and a JOY to write. Part Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, part James Bond, with a dash of wandering Time Lord, McInnes is an RAF pilot living in a world without wings. Ayoub Khote plays the role in HG World, Googies and now his own short series "A Simple Prop" making him the only character (even counting Todd Rage) to show up in all HG World related properties. Starting with "Scotland the Brave" (because I had to) and Queen's "One Vision" I tried to select the kind of hard-driving, British-slanted rock you'd expect to hear in the middle of a dogfight or a fight through a herd of a thousand zombies. It tries to mix a complex tapestry of violent disregard of authority with archer fingers raised with an undertone of honor and duty. McInnes is about adventure and action, so you'll find a mix of Sex Pistols and The Clash, Elvis Costello and Black Sabbath with some McInnisian transitions courtresy of Mojo Nixon, Strawberry Switchblade and The Specials. This was tough to populate at first, but now there is over 3 hours of music to smash things by.
Constable Jeb's Head Voices
Jeb is another character I love to write. He's a brute. He might seem stupid, but as Jill Woodbine said of him, he's like an oncoming storm; when he's there you just have to ride him out and cope. Voiced by DT Kelly, I could write the line "I like kittens" and Jeb would make it sound like he likes them grilled and covered in wing sauce. Fitting to his character, this playlist is an hour of batshit angry rock and metal. I pulled songs listed as the favorites of combat soldiers in Iraq along with some of the songs I used to play (that contributed to my tinnitus) in college. Korn, Limp Bizkit, Eminem, Dope, RATM, AC/DC...that's the theme.
Jill Woodbine's iPhone
The Diary of Jill Woodbine is a story about HG World from the perspective of an inquisitive young woman who doesn't believe everything the managers tell her. Diary is designed to be a noir detective story with a Gothic horror feel and supernatural undertones. As one wonderful listener wrote me, "If Buffy were a lesbian and fought zombies instead of vampires, it would be The Diary of Jill Woodbine". I'd like to believe that's true. Her iPhone has an hour of eclectic songs that I think Jill would listen to while writing her own stories, composed and performed mainly by regional artists I've met or heard on the convention circuit including SJ Tucker, Jonah Knight and Voltaire along with some songs I think she might have pulled from her mom and dad's collection.
So check out these playlists and, if you dig them, please subscribe so I know there are people enjoying them as much as I am while writing the shows.
One thing I may try for Season Two is a "song swap" track for each episode. One scene, for example, would ROCK if it had "Welcome to the Jungle" playing underneath it. Because I can't pay $25,000 for legal rights, I might just produce a version without it, but with instructions for people who own the music (and have a music editor) to superimpose the cut they own at the timecode I'd specify. Not sure about the legality of it, but it's for private use and I think it would sound awesome. On the other hand, I see some logistical problems with that. Stay tuned.
I used to be a casual Pandora listener and kept it in the background while I wrote or revised my scripts. Pandora is pretty much Internet radio with a clever algorithm to help identify songs with similar musical elements to keep your interest. If you search for Warren Zevon or, say, "Werewolves of London" Pandora may not pull out the specific request, but may offer you something similar. I never really understood that because if I ask to hear "Excitable Boy", I don't want to hear Jackson Browne play "Lawyers in Love". On the other hand, when I pick Metallica, I can be assured of hours of screaming vocals and power chords. It's a bit of a trade-off because you have no control over the queue and can only skip over so many songs before being locked into their rotation. Of course, you have more options if you choose to subscribe to the paid service.
I tried Spotify a few months ago because it allowed me to find and queue specific songs and artists. While it misses a lot of my favorite artists (or offers covers and karaoke versions of them) it has a tremendous amount of obscure material ranging from blues and jazz to techno and whatever modem carrier signal music kids today love. Like Pandora, you can pay to remove the advertisements and a larger song library. But I'm cheap. Spotify lets me select the songs I want, skip, rewind, replay, save my playlists and share them with people. It's pretty cool.
At Farpoint, a listener asked my how I titled the episodes of HG World because they read like song titles. He couldn't find some of them. I mentioned that the titles to the main series episodes are, in fact, lyrics. I couldn't remember all of them off the top of my head, so I went back through and searched for them on Spotify.
I was surprised how many of them were online. While Spotify doesn't have a lot of Pink Floyd, it does have Roger Waters' albums, so I was able to cheat a little by subbing in decent cover versions or remakes. Musically, it doesn't always flow well ("Welcome to the Jungle" into "Thriller" doesn't quite work, but it's in episode order), but I was able to create a list of all the title songs in order and then added future episode titles and songs either referenced in the show or that WOULD appear if I had the budget to license them for the podcast. Check out the list here (and please subscribe!)
HG World: The Music
The cool thing is that your iTunes subscriptions are searchable within your Spotify environment. Because I have HG World on iTunes, I can add them to the playlist and introduce each episode by it's "title song". It requires some manual set up, but you can do it, too if you have iTunes and Spotify on the same workstation. That assumes you subscribe to HG World through iTunes, of course.
WRAG Radio: Top Tracks with Todd Rage
The Spotify playlist for Todd Rage's AM station is 11 hours of hits from the fifties to the "end of real music" in the 70s" (plus a few exceptions before and after that period) that I think of when writing the character of Todd Rage. I imagine these songs crackling out of an AM radio in the night - songs of hope and loneliness, loss and an enduring American spirit. It's got everything from Billie Holiday to The Animals. Sam Cooke, Van Morrison, the Eagles, Elvis, Waylon Jennings, Rod Stewart... touchstones from a long life listening to music. I think it's an excellent mix to play while cleaning out the garage, painting the living room, driving across eater-infested territory late at night or just hiding out and scraping beans from the last can in your pack.
I toyed with feeding Keith "Todd Rage" DeCandido with some script bumpers to thread into the WRAG-AM playlist and may still do this. It would be neat to be able to plug random reports, PSAs, commercials and even AD links into the playlist.
Dogberry's Playlist
Dogberry, as played by Lee Sands, is one of my favorite characters. He's weird, chaotic and sometimes dangerous. His tastes are scattered, so his music reflects that same weird, sometimes troubles, borderline creepy yet loveable vibe. So of course I had to add some Thunderclap Newman, Jonathan Coulton, David Bowie, They Might Be Giants, even a little Buckner & Garcia.
McInnes' In-Flight Recorder
Group Captain McInnes is one of the most popular characters and a JOY to write. Part Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, part James Bond, with a dash of wandering Time Lord, McInnes is an RAF pilot living in a world without wings. Ayoub Khote plays the role in HG World, Googies and now his own short series "A Simple Prop" making him the only character (even counting Todd Rage) to show up in all HG World related properties. Starting with "Scotland the Brave" (because I had to) and Queen's "One Vision" I tried to select the kind of hard-driving, British-slanted rock you'd expect to hear in the middle of a dogfight or a fight through a herd of a thousand zombies. It tries to mix a complex tapestry of violent disregard of authority with archer fingers raised with an undertone of honor and duty. McInnes is about adventure and action, so you'll find a mix of Sex Pistols and The Clash, Elvis Costello and Black Sabbath with some McInnisian transitions courtresy of Mojo Nixon, Strawberry Switchblade and The Specials. This was tough to populate at first, but now there is over 3 hours of music to smash things by.
Constable Jeb's Head Voices
Jeb is another character I love to write. He's a brute. He might seem stupid, but as Jill Woodbine said of him, he's like an oncoming storm; when he's there you just have to ride him out and cope. Voiced by DT Kelly, I could write the line "I like kittens" and Jeb would make it sound like he likes them grilled and covered in wing sauce. Fitting to his character, this playlist is an hour of batshit angry rock and metal. I pulled songs listed as the favorites of combat soldiers in Iraq along with some of the songs I used to play (that contributed to my tinnitus) in college. Korn, Limp Bizkit, Eminem, Dope, RATM, AC/DC...that's the theme.
Jill Woodbine's iPhone
The Diary of Jill Woodbine is a story about HG World from the perspective of an inquisitive young woman who doesn't believe everything the managers tell her. Diary is designed to be a noir detective story with a Gothic horror feel and supernatural undertones. As one wonderful listener wrote me, "If Buffy were a lesbian and fought zombies instead of vampires, it would be The Diary of Jill Woodbine". I'd like to believe that's true. Her iPhone has an hour of eclectic songs that I think Jill would listen to while writing her own stories, composed and performed mainly by regional artists I've met or heard on the convention circuit including SJ Tucker, Jonah Knight and Voltaire along with some songs I think she might have pulled from her mom and dad's collection.
So check out these playlists and, if you dig them, please subscribe so I know there are people enjoying them as much as I am while writing the shows.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
The writer's mood
Some days, the writer/director can feel this way:
Or see himself as:
But much of the time you feel like...
...and sometimes you feel like you're sucking down peppermint schnapps and calling Morocco at two in the morning...
So the gamut for writers is anywhere between Orson Welles and Mark Borchardt.
But this is how you gotta look at it, kittens...
But this is how you gotta look at it, kittens...
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