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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Teague
I feel like I just heard their side.
Someone mentioned this article recently - Trey, maybe? - and it's the sort of stuff we always talk about, but still, reading it was eye-opening.
Yeesh. Sell your stocks, everyone. Also if anyone wants to come build cabinets with me in Idaho, plane tickets are still available.
I am not fully opposed to naming the album some permutation of this thread title.
Anyway.
Since said breakthrough, I've gotten down about ten Worthwhile Song Snippets, wherein I've figured out a tonic space (chord progression, melody area, harmony area) and a "voice" for a particular song idea, and fleshed it out to at least a verse and a chorus to remind myself later what such a song would be like. This is my new strategy: from my list of fifty song titles, I want to get twenty song snippets down by one week before I leave for Boston. (Which is now happening on the 8th, so I wanna be done with twenty snippets by Monday the 1st.) At this point, I'll either whittle down what I have to my ten favorite ideas, or just send all twenty as-is to Andy and Alex, and see which ones they think have the most potential.
In any case, over-deliver a week in advance, and spend the last week tightening up the "selects." By the end of that period, I hope to have seven Fully Written Songs to take with me to Boston, from which we'll pick the best five or so for the album. (And presumably they'll end up going through a couple more rewrites through the rehearsal / tracking process.) As I said, I've got ten so far; ten proto-songs. If you've hung out in the live chat, you know the song "Mister Perfect?" Like that. Enough of a song that you know what the song is, but only about fifty seconds long.
It's worth noting that I consider getting to Worthwhile Song Snippet phase the hard part - after you have that stuff, it's just a matter of writing more words and a bridge. Much easier than coming up with the functional bits of the basic song construction. For me, anyway. (Faking this, remember?)
Since I'm in the spirit of sharing, I'll give ya ten song titles. Who knows if you'll ever hear any of these, or if they'll have the same name when you do.
I'm Not Crazy About Radiohead
Writing A Letter (To Your Mom and Dad)
This Pen Sucks
When Will You Be The Past
I Like Your Stupid Face Just In General
It's Not You, It's Her
Some Kind Of Calamity
Recently Outlawed Hairdos
Little Kid With A Gun
The Insidious Communist Propaganda of Steve*
*thanks to Dorkman, for inspiring this song title in the Nightmare Before Christmas commentary
Of these, gun to my head, my top three are Writing A Letter, Recently Outlawed Hairdos, and Some Kind Of Calamity. (Honorable mention to This Pen Sucks.) But it's impossible to say. This represents at most half of what the spread will be when I start whittling it down, which means the next five songs I write could be my new five favorites, and then that again, and these wouldn't make it into the top ten.
Or the rest will suck. Who knows. Anyway, happy with the progress. God help me.
Also, planning on taking a nice video camera with me to document the Boston parts of this in video, so if anyone wants to donate a nice camera to the cause, I'll ship it back to ya when I'm done.
I'm serious. Mail me a camera. She won't get a scratch.
Is it better to burn out or to fade awayyyy?
Actually, come to think of it, this is kind of a meta joke.
I didn't know that shit still worked.
I dunno. I talk to Holden, but I never seem to learn anything. I just assume he's got it under control.
ROFL
"YEAH. That was FUCKED UP. And it ripped off SPEED."
I liked it, but didn't care. Same as Returns.
But I did make one observation that seems oddly crucial to this film and other modern filmmaking.
Tell me about Superman, as if you had only seen this movie. Don't tell me what happened to Superman, tell me about him. Describe Superman as a person. Imagine you're setting me up on a date with him. Who is he?
Right? Nothing.
"Character development" in this movie (and other recent ones I can think of) boils down to simply showing formative experiences, without showing how they actually formed the character. You never see how someone reacts to their circumstances, or reconciles them.
You find out that something has happened to someone, and then you see them later. That's modern character development. My contention is that we shouldn't see what happens to them and then not see how they build their life afterwards, we should see the opposite. We should hear that something awful happened to a character, as we learn more about what they're doing now and how they're managing. Character is personality, and personality is internal reactions - not external events.
Anyway. Movie happened. Disliked score. Come at me Alex.
Looks like a rush job or a favor. Probably both.
Oh, I'll get there. I've been wanting to do a general "Teague vomits his stupid opinions about movie poster design" thread for a long time, but I wasn't actually prepared for that today, I just saw the Mondo poster and got excited as balls. Explanations and examples are coming.
Consider it a cold open? I dunno.
And in a stunning turn of events, this isn't even about Drew Struzan. Yet.
I'm a massive snob when it comes to movie posters. It's a form that more and more amateurs have been making their way into as filmmaking has democratized, and it's a perfect example for the distinction between breaking the rules on purpose and not knowing there are rules to break. People make posters - and other people fawn over them - that look like they're right, they kinda look poster-y somehow, but are totally dropping the ball on the fundamentals of good poster design. And it kind of drives me insane.
I'd love to bloviate on the subject quite a bit over the course of this thread, and on the above distinction with examples, but to start with I just wanted to share this particular poster from Mondo.
If you're not familiar, Mondo does commissioned movie poster art from time to time, where they'll bring in an artist and have them design a poster for a movie they love. (Or that Mondo thinks they can sell.) The internet goes crazy for these pieces, and they usually drive me up the wall. They're often superb pieces, drawings, paintings, but the poster form doesn't lend itself to the style of artist they tend to bring in. (In my opinion, natch.) Often they're hyper-detailed line art in monochrome or stylishly limited color palettes.
If it was only meant to be a cool painting, I'd dig it. They always cross the "cool painting" threshold. But the purpose of the movie poster is to sell the film and the attitude contained within it, and generally movie posters follow a particular style of layout. (Not particular layouts, a particular style of layout, philosophy of layout.) And Mondo posters, not to put too fine a point on it, rarely do.
I have all these opinions man, and what am I supposed to do, keep them to myself?!
Anyway. Today Mondo released this, and it's not only far and away my favorite Mondo piece from everything I've seen*, it also just vaulted onto my "top ten posters of all time" list.
*note, this category includes at least one poster that my friend did that I purchased and framed.
That's what I'm talkin' about!
Anyway, we're gonna do this thread in themes. More themes will come, and you can post again, but for now...
Only post one movie poster. Your favorite movie poster of all time. Explain why it's your favorite.
Al. Bum. Al. Bum.
Want more.
Yay, I get to post this-
Just pulled up this thread solely to find and elsewhere use that .gif. You have done well.
I believe I have cracked the case.
I don't think this is how you're supposed to be a serious songwriter, but fuck that, I'm just writing songs that are fun and enjoyable. Not like I'm trying to write "Hallelujah" over here, shit. Anyway, my trick is just come up with a whole list of cool sounding name-ish prompts and write songs with those for titles. Already I've gotten four new songs down, all four of which I'd be okay with on an album. This is good news.
To give you an idea, here's one of my favorites from the list of about fifty phrases I came up with:
"The Overwhelming Tragedy of Floyd's Knobs"
Do I have a song that could use that as the title? Fuck no. Can I write a song to fit that title? Bitch please.
This has proven most helpful.
Also, it's possible my album will make no goddamned sense.
That'll only give you the chat link after you've logged into the forum?
Cuz I dunno how to do that. 
Yep. "Hid" the full chat link during my Reddit / 4chan madness so I'd/we'd have a safe place to talk about it. Since nobody gets registered to the forum without my approval, it's basically a gate that keeps outsiders out. They can see the forum, but not the chat.
Real-life spoilers: neither of them are British, and the guy who plays Felix has a southern-sounding accent.
EDIT: And he's 23.
Loved it.
Nobody listens to Felix!
Awesome.
I did not understand a god damned thing that was happening in this movie.
But my not-an-idiot friend dug it.
Nine stars!
Reviews are coming in. Some bad. Some good.
I'd wanna include Twinkles on such a thing. She'd love that.*
*would not
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