Feb. 2024 Progress Report (BIG UPDATE!)

HEADS UP! This is a big post that talks about a new BIG VIDEO ALBUM PROJECT I'm working on! It means I won't be posting a video (on YouTube) until July, with the hope that I can post a new video every other week until the end of the year. If you're wondering, "Hey, why isn't Brian posting anything on the YouTube channel?" this post should give you all the details!

Happy Leap Day, everyone! Even with the extra day, this dang month goes by so fast.

WHAT'S NEW ON THE PATREON?

• BRIAN BRECOMMENDS: Laika: Aged Through Blood 
• BELIEVE (Cher Cover) + SPA DAY 

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO?

This month has been full of work that isn't very visible—writing, scheduling, general prep—but nonetheless important. But here's some visible work:

First, I was in another Watcher show where we talked Top 5 Video Game Foods!

Second, I've been trying out a new livestream show. It's called "Watch This While You Do Your Art" (WTWYDYA) because it's designed to be put on in the background while you do your own arts and crafts (and homework and coding and all other things that I consider to be art). 

It's been a great way for me to work on creative stuff that I don't give myself time for, like learning Ableton by making a Cher cover, or creating spa music, or developing my own Earthbound boss. Creating for the sake of creating! It normally happens on Mondays from 2-5pm PT (but next week's will be Tuesday from 2-5pm PT). Come through!

Third, I'm the new fact checker for Um, Actually!!!! 

We filmed this last year, and it was extremely challenging to not spill the beans immediately! I was so fortunate to have some incredible researchers and writers who helped me create the statements for the show, and I feel like I was able to put in a good amount of non-standard-but-still-very-nerdy questions for this season. Ify and I had so much fun filming together, and I hope you all enjoy the full season (which will be releasing every other week on Dropout)!

Speaking of releasing a video every other week...

WHAT'S NEXT? A BIG VIDEO ALBUM PROJECT!

Like a lot of musicians, I record little melody snippets into my phone's voice memos in case I want to use them later—and then I never listen to them. I have dozens of 20 second recordings of me going "bah ba bah ba BAH ba bah bAH!" in the hope that I'd remember it whenever I sit down to write a song.

For SONGFEST 2024, I finally dug through all those voice memos, pulling a few recent ones to try writing them on stream. And, surprise surprise, they actually DID help me write those songs! After songfest, I thought to myself, If those voice memos helped me, why don't I try all those other ones I've recorded in the past five years?

In the past month, I've tried writing music to a bunch of these recordings. I ended up with ~15 song snippets that I thought were pretty solid—solid enough to think, Hey, at least 10 of these could make for a pretty good album of songs!

So for the first time in a very long time, I'm trying to make an album! It'll still have short, silly songs, a la "this song is not a metaphor" or "it's nesting season," but a couple of them are just, I don't know, real songs? Not that the other music I make isn't real, but these ones are more like "See the Day" or the other stuff I've made with Jonah! You get what I'm talking about.

Even more surprising: I actually started a SCHEDULE!

I hear great things about this technique called "making a plan," and even though I rarely use it, I've decided to give it a try for a project this big. Here's a spreadsheet I've made:

I make things nonlinearly—I'll start one song, then develop a bit of the video idea, then go back to the lyrics, and then I'll bounce to a different song before finishing the first one. 

That's why I made this: it'll keep track of everything and make sure that I'm logging the progress. Currently, most of my progress is on the "SKEL." of the songs, which are the skeletons—melody, structure, etc. 

You can see my estimated publish dates on the right, but those will definitely move around depending on which song is done first! The reason I'm delaying the publishing dates until July (and the rest of the year) is threefold:

1) I can give myself a little more time to polish the product, or even go back and completely rework something if I think it isn't great, without feeling the overwhelming dread of needing to publish something immediately. 

2) I can work with some other amazing creators to help make the videos or parts of the songs! I'd love to work with some animators for a few videos, and this should make sure that they aren't CRUNCHED in order to get the video done in time.

3) I think it'd be fun to have a consistent publishing schedule for a change. Something people can come back to every other week. Sometimes it's nice to prepare a whole lot of work and then slowly release it to help build excitement!

WHAT'S GONNA BE ON THE PATREON IF YOU'RE NOT POSTING UNTIL JULY?

Aha! I'm not posting them on YouTube until July. I'll be posting the songs and videos as soon as they're finished on the Patreon! All the perks you normally get in each of the paid tiers (i.e. early videos, bloopers, song downloads) mean that you'll get those perks as soon as I complete the them, even if I'm not going to publish it to the masses for a few months.

And of course, you'll get these progress reports to hear how things are going on each of the songs/videos I'm making. For example, I've made the most progress on the song called "songfest 2 *embroidered suit*" so I'll show you how that's going right now:

HOW IS "SONGFEST 2 *EMBROIDERED SUIT*" GOING RIGHT NOW?

Pretty okay! I have the full skeleton, and I'm writing the lyrics before I send it over to Jonah to have him help out with the full production, because I want the song to be extra good.

At the same time, I've started prepping the video, which is why this song is tentatively called "embroidered suit." Surprise: it will star an embroidered suit.

I'm using the embroidery I talked about in the last Progress Report to really soup up this clearance rack suit I bought. My idea is to make the whole video a one-take dance video where I have the camera move around to different images I have embroidered onto the suit, including images of me dancing in the suit! How meta! Here's an example of this process:

First, I'll choreograph the dance in the suit (unembroidered). Then I'll film me dancing in the suit (still unembroidered). Then I'll take screenshots of me dancing in the suit, and I'll draw a loose outline that I think could make for good embroidery.

Then, I'll take that outline and put it into my surprisingly expensive embroidery program (seriously, this program is SO expensive. Why? I felt very silly buying it. I guess that's what you can do if you're the only good embroidery program in the market?) so I can turn it into an embroidery pattern. 

Once that's all done, and once I have planned out what the camera will be looking at during different parts of the video, I'll start embroidering the full suit! Hopefully, at the end, it'll become a little piece of physical art that makes the music video extra special! I'm extremely excited about this.

I hope to be done with the full song sometime in the next month, with the actual embroidery/video taking a little longer. But of course, I'll keep you all up-to-date with how it's going!

WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?

Writing and pitching and all that other stuff that is basically a second job but without a paycheck! Haha, I love the entertainment industry!

I'll stop the progress report here, but thanks for sticking with me and reading all about this new project. 

By allowing myself a few months to just work, instead of feeling the constant pressure to publish now publish now publish now or everyone on the internet will think you're dead, I have to say that I feel really inspired for the first time in months. 

I hope you enjoy the videos and songs when they come out, and I am so grateful that you all have given me the chance to work on something I can be excited about!