SPOILER ALERT! Preview For Hedonist Music Video Script - Part 2

Today's blog post is Part 2 of a 4 part series where I am giving you a preview of the actual script we'll be using to shoot my upcoming music video Hedonist.

Hedonist the music video has been a huge undertaking. As pleased as I am with my last music video Lapdance Romance, my goal is to make Lapdance Romance look like and idiot compared to Hedonist. Hedonist is going to have 4 sets  with separate action sequences that relate the overall concept of the song visually. I've decided to post the scripts I've written for each set in a 4 part series.

In my first post of this series I revealed the script for The Psychiatrist's Office of  the Mind's Eye. It' lays down the premise and overall concept for the video. The the second of the sets is what I've called...

The Padded Cell of Hedonism

This set is where my character "The Patient" goes to escape the pain of being abused and forms yet another abusive relationship with "Hedonism."

THE PADDED CELL OF HEDONISM

by JENNY KIRBY

Scene 1

INT: Padded Cell

A shiny red vinyl padded cell with Hedonism, a god-like figure

with glistening silver skin reclining on a chaise lounge wearing

an opulent flowing black and silver brocade silk cloak. He is

visually a combination between the Roman god of wine Bacchus and

Gary Oldman as "old Dracula" from the 1992 film Dracula with a

gothic twist.

At Hedonism's feet is a heavily tatooed shirtless slave boy

fanning him. A female slave enters with a bottle of wine on a

tray. She pours Hedonism a glass of wine and hands it to him.

Hedonism chugs back the entire glass and hands it back to the

female slave.

Hedonism claps his hands summoning two nurses each with a slave

on a leash. The nurses inject the slaves with a drug that has an

aphrodisiac effect. The slaves fall to the floor and begin making

out while Hedonism watches with a satisfied look on his face.

Scene 2

INT: Padded Cell

Hedonism reclines on his chaise lounge as he is fanned by a male

slave at his feet and fed hors d'erves by a female slave.

Hedonism is surrounded by an entourage of hedonists dancing,

drinking and making out with each other.

As his face is being stuffed with food, a female hedonist "The

Hedonist" approches him. She is dressed in what could be

described best as black shiny Victorian fetish wear. Hedonism

motions for her to sit down with him. He summons for his female

slave to bring wine. The female slave pours two glasses of wine

and hands one to Hedonism and one to The Hedonist. The Hedonist and Hedonism clink their glasses as a toast to their union.

Hedonism motions for his male slave to come over and attend to

The Hedonist's every desire. The male slave moves behind The

Hedonist and begins stroking and kissing her neck. The Hedonist

turns her face to the male slave and kisses him passionately. As

they're kissing a nurse enters and straps a collar around The

Hedonist's neck.

Scene 3

INT: Padded Cell

Nurse #1's contorted body is positioned on the chaise lounge.

Nurse #2 has The Hedonist handcuffed with a leash attached to the

collar around her neck. Nurse #2 lays out two lines of a powdered

substance on Nurse #1's contorted body. Nurse #2 snorts a line

off of Nurse #1's body and then commands The Hedonist to do a

line as well. The Hedonist complies.

Album Update!

As many of you may know when it comes to my studio recordings, I'm essentially a one woman show. I write, record and produce everything myself with the exception of having a studio engineer when I'm recording vocals. It has it's set of advantages for sure. I get to have full creative control and don't have to deal with all the ego competition that goes along with having a band or butting heads with a producer over creative differences.

The disadvantage of doing everything myself is that it takes a lot longer.  I now finally have all of the vocals recorded, but now I am faced with the daunting task of having to edit vocals and pitch correct everything. It's hours, upon hours of mind numbing tedious work, and when I close my eyes at night all I see is waveforms. Don't get me wrong though, I love a challenge, and it's a great learning experience, and the more I do it the faster and better I get at it.

The good news is that all my hard work is paying off because I do have the vast majority of my rough mixes done for the album. I've decided to share a couple of my mixes with you. I've heard that it's a big no-no to post unfinished work on the interwebs, but I've never been one to follow the rules so, here's a couple previews of what I've been working on so far. Bare in mind they are ROUGH mixes so all the shit that gets done to them to make them broadcast quality hasn't been done yet.

Lapdance Romance Part 2 - A Labor of Love, Persistence and Complete Insanity

Lets Recap
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.

Orginal character design of my cyborg dominatrix alter ego

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...

Lapdance Romance Part 1 - A Labor of Love, Persistence and Complete Insanity

Waaaaaaaay back in July of 2010 I wrote a little ditty called Lapdance Romance. I wrote it as a romantic gesture for a man I met and fell in love with at a strip club. We met because he was lonely, bored and on a whim decided to go to his local strip joint and get a lap dance(or 4). As fate would have it, I was the lucky stripper and we fell madly in love. Then some shit happened, we broke up, I wrote the song as a big romantic gesture, we got back together, got married blah blah blah etc. It's the kinda stuff movies are made of really. However I'm not a filmmaker, so I wrote a song and painted a lovely picture about it instead.

So, when I originally wrote the song, I recorded a demo of it using only Reason 4.0 and Sonar as my DAW in my makeshift home studio one sunny summer afternoon. I then presented the song to my estranged sweetheart as a romantic gesture to let him know that I still loved him. It truly was a labor of love. 

Fast forward almost 4 years later and I'm still working on the damn thing. I had some lofty goals for this song and they're finally coming to fruition. It wasn't just enough to record my crappy home-recorded demo and give it to the object of my affection. NOOOOOOOOO, not me, that's just not how I roll. I needed to make a production of it, literally. I wanted to make a full-on cinematic style, professionally shot music video. So that's exactly what I did. It may have taken 2 almost years from the beginning of production til now, and they're have been numerous obstacles(illness, lack of money, battles with producers) to overcome, but the end is now in sight. 

This has been an amazing period of learning and growth for me both personally and professionally. It's been frustrating at times, but overall one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I'm gonna save the rest of the story for my next post though, but I guess you could say it all began when I approached my friend Arcelia Ocana of Ribbit Ribbit Studios to direct my video...

Gettin' Down To Business(sexy business that is)

Today I spent most of my time at my interior design day job applying for a FACTOR grant. For those of you who don't know what FACTOR is, it's The Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings. The Canadian talent in question is me! Yup, I'm Canadian, talented and in dire need of assistance, financially speaking.  Anyway, I digress as usual, but the point is that things are really moving forward with getting Lapdance Romance to being a commercially released single. Hooray!

As far as the studio sessions go, I'm having a blast recording with Ryan. We're both equally as depraved which is great when the song your working on is super sexually charged. We did guitars last time and the goal was to convey an orgasm using guitar in a part of the song. Needless to say, we succeeded and this song is going to be sexy as hell and give many a listener an eargasm. I know it gets my blood boiling. Well, that's enough about what a pervert I am, but I've always been a firm believer that art has to originate from an honest place.

Also, I'm pleased to announce that the Borg Queen store is open for business, so now all of you art fans out there can purchase giclee prints of the art for Sex, Drugs & Shiny Brass Poles. So, if you wanna support me as an artist and help me cover the costs of making the album, you can go to the store and buy some art now and feel all warm and fuzzy inside for being such a gosh darn nice person and helping an independent artist launch their career. I'd also like to note that as an extra added incentive for you hipsters out there that buying my art right now will only make you that much cooler, because it proves that you were a fan of Borg Queen WAY before everybody else.

So to sum it all up  in a neat little package(heh heh I said package)I couldn't be more please with how things are moving along and this is the most vital I've felt in a long time.

p.s. Buy some art!

I Was Wrong! Alan And Ryan Are Totally Rad

As it turns out, I do work well with others, very well in fact! Who knew? Anyway, I met with Alan Wong-Moon and Ryan "Tweak" Clark last week and needless to say I instantly clicked with Ryan and we've been in the studio for a couple sessions now working on Lapdance Romance.

I must say that I've been injected with new life and it's wonderful working with someone that really, truly "gets" me. This is really key though to the whole production process for me, because my biggest fear was that these guys were going to push my music in a direction that would ensure commercial success, but me as an artist would get lost in the uber polished production. Thank God this isn't the case!

The track is sounding so amazing and I can't wait for it to be done. We're planning to release it as a single along with a music video which will be shot by Ribbit Ribbit here in the next few months. As with any art form this is all a huge process, but instead of being freaked out that I'm not getting any younger I'm enjoying every moment of creation. Thanks Ryan. You rock!