Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Friday, July 08, 2011

Bike Ride -- Soon!

I got an email from a kids-music band in Ottawa -- a friend of a friend who recommended my band as an opener for a gig in the fall. They're into playing bar shows for families, just like me, but they needed a local opener to book a gig at the Mansion. Who knew? I count as a local draw? Cool! I guess I'll need to put together a band again. It's, uh, November something. I'll look it up. November 6th. There you go. Be there! It's like 4 months away. . .

Peja and I have been working on a couple of songs together. She actually walked up to me the other day and showed me a sheet of lyrics that she had written. Sometimes I forget that she can write. . . And then she proceeded to sing the songs for me; she had work out some melodies. I never asked her to do it, and I was really surprised. She takes piano lessons, and enjoys them, but doesn't practice much (generally only when I ask her to), and rarely asks about going over to the music school. My hammond organ is just as likely to be a spaceship as a musical instrument when her friends are over. But here she was creating stuff. Pretty neat. Sienna's still telling me to do a kids album -- maybe Peja's ready to write/record one with me. Our best song right now is a counting song. Spanish numbers have WAY more syllables than english, french, or japanese. . .

I got invited to jam with one of my favorite bands, The Trash Daddies, last night. They opened the first Central Family Dance show, and they are an amazing group of musicians. They're also the nicest 4 people I've ever been in a room with. I brought my telecaster, and was terrified all night of fucking up the great sound they have. I hope I stayed out of the way enough. On every song they have this amazing tight 4 part harmony, and they have great banjo, mandolin, and guitar stuff on everything. I've been trying to get them to come and record a song and make a performance video -- maybe I'll just bring some gear next time.

I'm finishing up the script for Bike Ride -- I thought the next Happy Kid Production would be a script called Stroller, but my cousin Tom, who I cast for the lead, hasn't managed to find time to come to Kingston, so I think I'm going to start working on the next one. I've cast the two leads (Peja is one), and I think I'm going to shoot it in Skeleton Park (I wrote it with City Park in mind, but then remembered that I live 2 blocks from Skeleton Park). After those two is one called Monopoly Junior -- I kind of want to act in that one, but I need a camera operator. . .

Anecdote has gotten lots of good reactions, and it's viewing numbers have been great on Vimeo. It was made so quickly and for $0 (uh, I think Emily kindly bought/made her wedding dress; Thanks Emily!), but I really loved making it. It took me a few shoots to get comfortable with directing actors, but the last day of shooting was really fun, and Mark and Emily did such fantastic jobs. I think my work on it is very student-filmish, but, hey, I dropped out before I finished film school, so I think I deserve a few more low-pressure directing gigs.