Well, it has been at least three months since I last updated you all on what had been going on and I have to admit, I have been spending a disproportionate amount of time down the Chasing A Rainbow rabbit hole.
It has, it is accurate to say, been a project that has stolen pretty much every ounce of air in the room and as a consequence, the music projects such as Time Demands have been pushed back into the background up to this point, until this week.
There has been an awful lot of work to do on Rainbow; not only was it brought up to date and taken to the London Screenwriters Festival in Regent’s Park in April which I was hoping to use to pitch it to the industry except when I got there on the Wednesday before the festival kicked off properly, it became very clear very quickly just how un-ready I and the Chasing A Rainbow project were.
Slots for pitching went very quickly; something like a thousand tickets were sold to the event for people to attend both virtually and in person at Regents University and there was, over the whole two-day pitching events, no more than 160 slots available. And, this was one occasion where the technology, it has to be said, worked too well. The organisers did go to a lot of trouble to brief those who turned up to webcasts and to zoom meetings that “when the booking system goes live, this is what you need to do, make sure you do this and then do that and press this here. Dont worry, we expect to have lots of slots available so, if in doubt, reach out to x, y and z”.
So far so good, right? Kind of. Except that the reality of it was, come 10AM on the Saturday morning the week before the event, everybody who was looking to get a pitching slot all piled on and refreshed their browsers at exactly the same time, from wherever in the world they were and the SAAS system that was logging all the keystrokes for who was reserving what slots basically, took the first 160 applicants who were looking for each of the four slots and you could see these things going red in front of your eyes as the slots were taken and reserved.
It took less than 20 seconds for all 160 slots to go. You had basically enough time to look at the list of slots that you wanted, go into the appropriate day (my first choice was Saturday afternoon), oh good, still slots left, put in your email address and phone number press enter and….. f***, its gone. All “sold out”. All slots taken. Shit. OK, go to the second choice, Thursday morning. OK, pick that one, go into that day and… f***. Thats full as well. Every one of the forty slots in four sessions across two days was red and full in the time it took you to read this paragraph. All 160 slots were gone.
So, at £400 a ticket, a lot of people were very sharp off the mark and those who got it, got it. Those who didn’t… well, a lot of us did think well, the main reason we were going to go was to pitch, if there is no chance to pitch, is there a point in going any more? Quite a few were quite pissed off about it and there was an awful lot of chuntering to the organisers.
Luckily, I decided that there was still a good reason to go and as I say, by the time I got there, I found out it was just as well that I didn’t get a slot because neither I or my screenplay were ready.
Cut a long story short (and it is a very long story, the rest of it is on a Substack called The Diary Of A Screenplay, which I have going at the moment) and basically, after that Festival I did come back with renewed purpose to get this screenplay right and that is what I’ve spent the last three months doing. The screenplay went from v2.0.7 to v3.0 which I took to London and for the last few months it has been working its way up to v6.0.4, which is nearly four major revisions from what it was at the beginning of the year. There has been an awful lot of documentation to do to get it ready for pitching which is what is happening at the moment, plus there has been a website to build and there has been also a novel version of it that I have written, 75,000 words, which I’m hoping to publish either later this year or early next year, depending on whether I self-publish it through Amazon or a vanity publisher or whatever. So, thats why I’ve been quiet for a while when it comes to music.
One of the things that I have tried to do in the last two weeks is to pull the Time Demands project back into the sunlight and press on with it. I’ve not been a 100% happy with the vocals of mine that I have done, so between them Suno and also IK Multimedia’s ARA based AI tool called Re-Sing has been used extensively to provide me with alternate vocals. My vocals are being kept for one track and one only at the moment and all the rest have been replaced by Re-Sing vocalists. It has been quite a buggy experience as well where Cubase has been crashed quite regularly by Re-Sing, so it has been quite a tortuous process at times and I’ve had to regress the software on both Cubase and Re-Sing to get it to work. Also, Suno, when I’ve been working on some of the tracks, where I have asked it to cover the song, it has this bloody annoying habit of not following instructions and adding in spurious chord changes and key changes where I really dont want them which has pissed me off quite a lot. The two songs where it has worked and where the vocals from Suno are being kept are A Strange Love (also brings in a saxophone solo as well, which I wanted) and also the title track of the album, Time Demands. All the rest are Re-Sing generated. And in a lot of cases, particularly tracks like Only You And I Know and Silent Times, it has worked really well. I would have liked to have kept the Suno version as it had the real calypso flavour that I had spoken about but no matter how much I tried to thrash it into virtual obedience, it just didn’t want to know and kept on throwing in these spurious chord changes. In the end, I just walked away from it and frankly, I’m not 100% sure that I’m going to extend my Suno account anyway, once this annual period runs out. It has served its purpose but I’m not convinced that I’m going to end up keeping it.
So. Anyway… as it stands this evening, I’ve been working on Raindrops and Razorblades with a Re-Sing vocalist called Neil, who while he sounds very little like Wayne Hussey, does seem to fit it better than my vocal does, so thats the one I’m going with. Musically, the first part of the track does very much have that Mission UK feel to it, which is exactly what I wanted, so I’m hoping that as this one’s Mix1 proceeds over the coming few days that it will all come together. I have another film related thing to attend in London at the BFI on the 12th July, but otherwise, the path is quite clear for me to be able to push on and try and get Time Demands finished and to then start on the Chasing A Rainbow soundtrack later in the year.
I promise I’ll try not to leave it so long next time. I’ll be back when Time Demands is mixed and mastered with a prospective release date, then we can start talking about the Chasing A Rainbow soundtrack work…
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