In anticipation of the release of my song/music video/visual masterpiece that is Lapdance Romance I've decided to re-hash my long arduous production journey. To recap, Lapdance Romance was a song and painting that I created for my husband, before he was my husband while we were on a break. I wrote and recorded the original demo back in 2010. You can listen to the original demo it on my Soundcloud profile here.
As mentioned before I tend to think big, and as a product of the MTV generation I decided that I wanted to create an audio-visual masterpiece in the form of a music video that would use the story behind the song and visuals in the painting as it's inspiration. When approached my director friend Arcelia Ocana of Ribbit Ribbit Studios about the project and played her the song, her reply was, "Jenny, we love the song and we want to make you famous!" This is typical Arcelia as she's a bubbling cauldron of positive, creative energy. So hurdle, number one, find a director, was done.
The DYI Insanity Begins
My next big issue was budget. I literally did not have a budget, at all. When Arcelia approached me about this (not so)minor detail I sheepishly mentioned that I don't have a budget, but have no fear because I have connections to talented(and generous) people AND a lot of this is going to be a largely DIY affair on my behalf. My hair brain scheme is that I would be a one woman art department as the video would be based on my art. Her response was, "No problem, we'll make it work. We all love you at Ribbit Ribbit and want to see you succeed."
Having gone to art school for animation and worked as an animator I was well versed in the art of story boarding and making animatics, so I offered to do the basic pre-production work myself and create an animatic for Arcelia to work off of. I've never made this animatic public before until now, so if you click the link of "The Lost Lapdance Romance Animatic" you'll be directed to my ultra secret You Tube video that up until now has only been seen by production staff.
Jenny Learns To Work With Others
One of the hardest things for me on collaborative creative projects is giving up control and letting others do their jobs. I saw making this music video as the perfect opportunity to do some personal growth, so when Arcelia approached me, and said that while they(Ribbit Ribbit) loved the animatic, they wanted to bring in a writer to write the script for the video. They wanted to keep the basic story the same, but they just wanted to write it themselves with my input of course. So, I let go and said ok. HUGE step for me.
The writer in question was someone that I had worked with before, Niko Koupanstis a very talented writer and actor that I had the pleasure of working with on a short film of Arcelia's called "Mime Love." He stuck to the basic storyline of whore falls for a client at a brothel while under the influence of absinthe but added some cool twists that served to really amp up the dark and creepy side of things. In Niko's version the whores became dolls that the madame keeps locked in display cases, but my favorite idea of his was that in the absinthe hallucination my character transforms into a cybernetic dominatrix.
His concept really allowed me to get creative with the character designs. As you can see below, the original character design I came up with for the cyber dominatrix and then the final product underneath it is me in my full make-up and costume.
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| Orginal character design of my cyborg dominatrix alter ego |
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| On set as my cyborg dominatrix character |
I guess you could say that the lesson learned here is that it never hurts to allow others to have some input because they might just come up with some pretty cool shit you would have never thought of. So when Arcelia approached me about improving the sound quality of my original recording by hiring a producer to work with, I was definitely less hesitant, but that's another story for another day as the saga of Lapdance Romance continues...
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