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Introducing: Upbeat Drop!

Cracker Funk

Cracker Funk

Long-time IT'ers have seen me, over the last few years, introduce a handful of projects. None of these projects have come to fruition (but I keep them as potential for the future). At this point, I may come off like The Boy Who Cried Movie, but I don't really care, haha. One of the things that I appreciate about IT is the fact that not only can I share my filmmaking ideas with other people who have similar ideas and get feedback from them, but I can share my filmmaking emotions with other people who "get it".

This time feels different. This time feels more like how I felt when I was in the early stages of developing Antihero. This time feels like something I've done before, except better. :)

In Upbeat Drop, Rosalyn DeLeon Geurerro, coming from a very traditional Catholic family, struggles to come out of the closet as lesbian, choosing to use musical expression to battle her inner-demons.

I'm making a musical! :D :D :D :D

I've spent the last couple months outlining and researching. The research is mainly character-related, as the two main leads are people with very different life experiences than me. The outline is pretty solid (at least insomuch as I have a general idea of the story), and I'm a few weeks away from being ready to start actually writing. The research has been going well, and it will be on-going until the shooting-script is finalized.

Which, in addition to just being excited about my project and wanting to share it, the deadline for the shooting-script is the main reason for this post. Up until a couple days ago, I had no deadline for my next screenplay. My idea was that I'd just let it happen in whatever time-frame it needed to happen. A couple days ago, life circumstances forced me to make a deadline. It's not an arbitrary made-up deadline. This one actually matters, for personal reasons that I don't care to share here.

The initial deadlines I've set are that I plan to be finished with the 1st rough draft by the end of January, 2017. And I need a finalized shooting-script by the end of November, 2017.

My main question is this -- seeing as how the 11-30-17 deadline for a shooting-script is one I need to stick to, do you think 1-31-17 is a good deadline for the 1st rough draft? Do you think I should allow more or less time for the many revisions that will need to take place?
 
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Cracker Funk said:
Oh, cool, thanks for the interest! Yeah, I can totally make it available for you. Or you can watch it with Nick. It's currently not available for sale, but I do have a vimeo link that I'd be willing to share with you on the downlow, if you'd like. PM me if you'd like the link.

Sorry, I didn't realize that you're a musician. That being the case, you probably know the definitions of those words better than I do.

To answer your question, I'm planning on using a few different methods for songwriting. I'd like to do some originals. For one, I've got a close friend who is a fantastic songwriter and so I'm going to reach out to him to ask if he'll write on. He has a perspective on life that would be particularly fitting for one of the songs I'd like to include (the climactic finale, actually). What I plan to ask him for is chord progressions and melody.

Everything else I'd like to arrange myself because of the specific nature of the music that we'll be making for this movie. I don't recall if I've mentioned it here and I'm too lazy to read back in this thread, but this movie is intended to be a tribute to the music of Bob Marley. That's both because I love the music of Bob Marley, and so it'll be fun for me to make. But also, and perhaps more importantly, I'm targeting a very specific niche audience -- the people of Saipan, and Pacific Islanders in general. I'm also targeting lesbians and Seattleites.

To the best of my knowledge, the indigenous people of Saipan (Chamorro) have never had a feature film made about them. To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a feature film shot in the Chamorro language. The hero of this story is a young Chamorro woman, attending school at the University of Washington, and she and her friends speak "Chamenglish", a dialect that is exactly what it sounds like.

All of these things are sub-cultures that I am rather knowledgeable about. I grew up (partially) in Saipan. I speak a fair amount of Chamenglish, and have a lot of Chamorro friends (a couple who are filmmakers). Most haolies on Saipan tend to stick to their haolie enclaves. When I was growing up there, I did the opposite. On the island of Saipan, I'm considered local, which is an incredibly rare thing for haolies. I've even had Chamorro friends describe me as an "honorary Chamorro".

I know it sounds like I'm bragging, but that's not my intent. The point I'm trying to make is that the movie is largely autobiographical, and it's going to be fun as shit to make because of how personal it is to me.

Anyway, sorry for rambling, but what I'm getting at is that on the island of Saipan, Marley is king. Everybody loves his music there. All of the locals, anyway. And so, in the story, our hero Rosalyn decides to make an LP that is intended to be a tribute to Marley, in that she is going to do her best to emulate him, right down to the nitty-gritty details. Since you're a musician, I'm guessing that you have probably taken music theory? Well in my story, the same way that if you're taking a music theory class you scientifically deconstruct the music of classical artists like Bach, Rosalyn is going to deconstruct the music of Marley, and then do her best to recreate it.

Which of course means that in real life, I need to do the same. It is going to be methodical, and not an easy task at all, but that's why I personally need to take control of all the arrangements. In the prior example, should my friend agree to writing a song for me, I'm going to do my best to make it sound like that song was made by Marley.

I'd also like to do some covers. For that, I plan to reach out to local musicians and any I can find online. If I find a song that I like, by an up-and-coming artist, I simply plan to tell them about the project and ask permission to do a reggae cover (with proper profit-sharing). And lastly, I've acquired the rights to a fairly famous song by Nat King Cole. I'm kinda shocked at how inexpensive it was (it's one of his lesser-known songs).

I'd also like to do a silent, lip-syncing "cover", haha. I just got the idea for this earlier today and I'm 100% in love with it.

There's no way in hell I'll be able to acquire the rights to any song by Marley. And I've been thinking that it'd be weird to have a movie that is a tribute to his music without including any of his music. It just occurred to me today that the way to get around the copyright issue is to have Rosalyn and Jackie (best friend and guitar player) enjoy a raucous lip-sync session with each other.

In this scene, Rosalyn and Jackie are going to cross paths in the school library. Rosalyn notices that Jackie is rocking the F' out with earbuds in. Rosalyn asks what she's listening to, and so Jackie gives one of her earbuds to Rosalyn. Rosalyn's reaction is pure joy. "Oh, my God, this song is the best!"

They then commence joyously lip-syncing the entire song with each other. Rosalyn takes "lead" vocals, Jackie takes "backup". But because they're in a library, they remain completely silent. Most audience members will probably not know what song they're "singing", but I believe my target audience will get it, and they'll "hear" the song in their head. This might be the most genius idea I've ever had, haha.

To further answer your question, maz, I mostly only plan to use sequencing for the arrangements. As much as possible, I'd like to get live instrumentation, for every instrument except maybe drums. Or maybe I'll experiment with recording cheap home-studio drum sessions, because in their early days, that's what the Wailers did, so maybe it'd be appropriate. :)
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Please do PM me the Vimeo link. London's still quite a way away...

I'm not a musician by any stretch, but I have dabbled in 'composing' my own bits of music with sequencer software and electronic instruments etc. What you're describing does sound like a daunting task, so good luck with it :) And I had literally never heard of that particular island or it's inhabitants, so the movie would be an education for me, despite not being any of your target markets...

And you know that genius lipsync idea? I agree it's genius, as I had the exact same idea as a key point for a planned webseries I am writing :grumpy::grumpy::lol: Oh well, I snooze I lose...
 
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Cracker Funk said:
There's no way in hell I'll be able to acquire the rights to any song by Marley. And I've been thinking that it'd be weird to have a movie that is a tribute to his music without including any of his music. It just occurred to me today that the way to get around the copyright issue is to have Rosalyn and Jackie (best friend and guitar player) enjoy a raucous lip-sync session with each other.
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Did you try get to get the license? Even if you only got one song which you could heavily feature, that would probably be a good investment. It might be worth checking into, even if only how much it would set you back, maybe you could do some crowdfunding for it, because you are right, it's a little weird to not have his music in there, though your lip-sync idea is really clever! And you should use it even if you COULD get a song. In your case, the rights to use a cover might even be better since you can have it performed by your cast.
 
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JoshL said:
Did you try get to get the license? Even if you only got one song which you could heavily feature, that would probably be a good investment. It might be worth checking into, even if only how much it would set you back, maybe you could do some crowdfunding for it, because you are right, it's a little weird to not have his music in there, though your lip-sync idea is really clever! And you should use it even if you COULD get a song. In your case, the rights to use a cover might even be better since you can have it performed by your cast.
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Actually, that's some good advice, and I appreciate you mentioning it. When I asked a question on IT, not to long ago, regarding how likely it was that I could get the rights to a Nat King Cole song, everyone speculated that it'd be out of reach. I was very happy to find out that it ended up being really inexpensive.

But this song is different. First, the song I chose to go after for Nat King Cole is one of his lesser-known songs. But the song I'm talking about from Bob Marley and the Wailers is VERY well-known. Like, even if you don't really listen to reggae, you probably have much of this song memorized. I'm not getting rights to this song, even with crowdfunding.

However, maybe I could follow your advice to try and get the rights to a lesser-known Marley song, and do both -- one of them silently, and the other with actual music. In fact, I can think of a couple really cool songs that I'd love to adapt from the era in which his group wasn't called "Bob Marley and the Wailers", but they were just known as "The Wailers". "Guava Jelly" would be a nice candidate, maybe "Small Axe".

Also, since you mention doing an actual cover, a friend of mine today offered a really good idea. Even if I'm unable to get the rights to any of his songs in advance, I should probably shoot a scene in which we do a cover, with the intent of not using it in the initial edit. And then, if the movie has any success on the festival circuit, we might be able to use that momentum to make it more likely to get the rights to the song in question so that we could use it in the final edit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCoAP43lujk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia6Tvpj6dPw
 
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You never know until you try! Definitely shoot for one of the "smaller" songs...but get a price on the big one too. It can't hurt to ask! And if you're focusing on Marley fans in this project, i'd lean towards Small Axe, as that it was also the name of a reggae zine throughout the 80s. Not that most people would get that reference, but for the few that do, you'll get massive cred with! Some info about that:
http://reggaelicious.pbworks.com/w/page/8800154/Small Axe
(I wonder how hard it would be to get an issue to use as a prop)
 
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