April showers bring...

One of first things I had to learn when I decided to try for a career in the Film and TV music business was just how patient you have to be when it comes to getting paid. Take the title of this entry for example - "April showers bring..." - Most of you would probably complete that phrase by adding "May flowers." But to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, let me change it up a bit and say it this way... April 2010 placements bring December 2010 royalties... So as you can see, patience is a necessity in this business. That's one of the aspects of this "glamorous" business that I end up having to explain the most to my non-music biz friends.

And speaking of April placements... For the first time ever, I know about a placement in advance of the show actually airing! I'm not sure which specific track is being used, but during Act 3 of tonight's episode of Rob Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory, I have a 20 second cue being used. I'm fairly certain it'll be an uptempo hard rock/metal cue. The show airs at 9:30pm Eastern. Check it out!

March Madness!

I don't think I could have come up with a more appropriate title for this entry. As many of you know, I'm a huge Kentucky basketball fan and (most) every year during the month of March they compete in a little basketball tournament affectionately known as March Madness. Well, they're not the only ones dealing with madness this month. I'll get to that in a minute but first I've got a quite a few items to update everyone on.

Let's start with where I left off, and that's with the film score project. In spite of the fact that my main studio computer was down for over half of the project ( It was a power supply issue, and after a poor job by the 2nd service tech that HP sent, I was able to get the machine back up and running by myself later that night), I was able to meet my March 1st deadline.

I can share more about the film now as well. It's a faith-based movie called Decision and it stars Natalie Grant and Billy Dean. I'm not exactly sure when it's going to air but the latest I heard was they expected it to be on TV sometime near the mid/end of April. Once I know more, I'll be sure to let everyone know. It was a great experience working on the film. The production company is planning on shooting more films this year and I've already been told to expect a phone call from them in the upcoming months about scoring those as well. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about that.

About 15 minutes after I found out that that every cue had been accepted and I was finished with the score, I got a postcard from our water company stating that our usage for the past month was higher than normal. This is where the madness begins...

Quick Update

While the studio computer is booting up, I wanted to post a quick update on what the last two weeks have been like. First off, my new studio computer is still down. The new motherboard got installed on Monday but it didn't solve the problem. They now think it's the power supply. The replacement part arrived today and the service tech is scheduled for tomorrow. So HOPEFULLY I'll be back up and running on the new machine by tomorrow night.

In the meantime, my old machine is doing the job. I've submitted 11 cues so far for the film score. I've been getting some positive feedback from the director so that's very encouraging. I've started to get into a bit of a groove and I think I've got a pretty good sense of what the director is looking for score-wise. I've still got quite a bit of music left to write, but not a whole lot of time left to do it in.

Speaking of which, gotta get back to it, that March 1st deadline is coming up quick!!!! But before I go, I just got to give a "shout out" to my awesome wife who is being so extremely supportive and encouraging through this "stressful" couple of weeks. I love you honey!

-Big Blue

The Best Laid Plans...

Ever have one of those days when the one thing that you absolutely could not afford to go wrong does? That was today for me.

I awoke this morning to find that my studio computer had decided to engage itself with a game of tag. But instead of chasing someone around and slapping them, it decided to turn itself off, wait a second, turn itself back on, but within a second or two before it could even get booted up, it would turn itself off again. This vicious cycle could only be stopped by disconnecting the power cable.

Obviously, there is never a good time to encounter this kind of computer problem. But when you're on a deadline of basically 3 weeks to compose a film score for a full-length film, well, that just makes matters worse.

Fortunately, for me, I still have my previous studio computer so I'm not at a total loss. But I did spend the entire day just installing two pieces of software (around 100GB each) just so I'd be able to keep working while I wait for my machine to get repaired. It is under warranty, but this is the second time I've had to have it fixed for basically the same issue. The last time they replaced the processor. This time they're replacing the motherboard. If it happens again, they'll be replacing a customer ;-)

Well, it looks as if the software is done installing so I better wrap this up and see if I can get anything done tonight.

- Big Blue

What's Up Ahead

As some of you already know if you happen to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, I recently got a gig scoring a full length film. I've had the rough edit for a few days but tomorrow I'm getting the locked version, as well as having a spotting session with the director. I'm very excited about this project, as it will be my first full length film scoring gig, and with a very quick deadline, I'm also slightly terrified :-)

Fortunately, I've got the support of many friends, family and colleagues to help provide some words of wisdom and encouragement. If this one goes well, then the possibility of other projects looks to be there. But I'm not worried about that. As a sports fanatic, I plan to take it one score at a time.

If the deadline wasn't as soon as it is, I would take the time to blog about the process while it's going on but I'm just not going to have enough time to do that. After I'm done I'll try to post a blog or two about the process and the overall experience.

Once I'm finished with the film project I'll start writing some "Reality TV" cues for my largest library client. I wrote a couple of them last year and so far one of them has been used in a couple of different shows over the last 3 months. I expect I'll be writing quite a bit more this time.

After that, well, if it's anything like the last project, then I'll probably need to take a break!

- Big Blue