Little Miss Liquid Courage: Preproduction Introduction

I was on the fence about doing another music video from my album Sex, Drugs and Shiny Brass Poles for a couple reasons. The first reason is the huge time and financial commitment involved and secondly I'm really eager to get back to work on my next EP, Blood Sweat Tears. However I feel like I'm leaving something incomplete if I don't make a music video for Little Miss Liquid Courage. It was part of the original plan to make 4 music videos for Sex, Drugs and Shiny Brass Poles and I've decided to stick to the plan.

Context Is Everything

Little Miss Liquid Courage is somewhat of an oddity both visually and sonically. I wrote the song ironically to be a pop song because the big idea behind it is "selling out" and conforming to the mainstream. Within the context of the lyrics it's specifically about the pressure as a woman to conform to mainstream beauty standards. When I was a stripper in my early 20's there was tremendous pressure to look as close as possible to a Barbie doll. The closer you resembled Barbie, the more money the booking agents could demand from the clubs. I personally was told to "soften" my look. What this meant was, dye your hair blond, get a tan, lose weight, cover your tattoos, take out your piercings, get fake tits and stop dancing to punk and metal. At first I was like, "no fucking way" but after 4 weeks of not having any work I caved and took out my piercings, dyed my hair blond, got a spray tan and began dieting. I hated myself for it. I remember being up on stage rather drunk and dancing to J Lo in a pink sequined costume laughing at myself for being a ridiculous parody of a stripper. Little Miss Liquid Courage is the inner monologue I was having at that moment in time.

Telling The Story Through Color

LITTLE MISS LIQUID COURAGE
Art prints are available through my website. Click image to purchase

Color plays a huge role in telling the story. I'm completely out of my comfort zone as far as the palette goes. I gravitate towards blue, greens, reds and purples, but for this video which is visually based on the painting the palette is literally my two most hated colors...pink and yellow. As you can see in the painting below the predominant colors are pink, yellow, red and black.

In the video there are three sequences and sets each using a different symbolic color scheme. The narrative sequence which is non-conformist me singing the song is black and red. I don't know if you've noticed, but my Borg Queen brand colors are black and red.

The play room sequence where the nurses determine whether or not my character is girly enough is predominantly yellow and white. I used yellow a symbol of conformity because in my childhood I went to a private school which was religiously and socially oppressive to the point where I had a nervous breakdown at 12 and had to leave. The uniforms were yellow and I use white to symbolize the innocence of childhood and the sterility of a clinical environment in which my character is being observed.

The operating room where the nurses transform me into a Barbie through a variety of barbaric surgical procedures is pink. Pink is a pretty obvious symbolic color and in this case is used to represent female gender stereotypes.

Here's a little preview of the storyboard video I put together. Normally storyboards don't have color, but what can I say, I'm a bit of an oddity even when it comes to artists. I always like to get feedback so feel free to shoot me an email an let me know your thoughts. Hit me up at borgqueenmusic@gmail.com

If you would like to support this project financially, you can always grab yourself a copy of the album or some merch at my online store https://www.borg-queen-music.com/store

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...