Let me talk you through it.
The idea
Back in the autumn of 2019, my friend Alex and I had a conversation wherein we stumbled upon this awesome idea: could it be possible to perform a song written like a choose-your-own adventure book? I sketched out the concept on a note on my phone under the heading “AMAZING ADVENTURE SONG IDEA” and relegated it to the territory of “will probably rediscover this note in a few years.”
This is an excerpt from a choose-your-own adventure book. They are not to be read beginning to end. The idea is for the reader to choose their path through the story by making the choices in the highlighted areas:
This is the only choose-your-own adventure book I remember reading. I got it out numerous times from Rhiwbina Library in Cardiff when staying with my grandparents. I distinctly remember having to choose whether to off an opponent using a “Psi-Exuder” or a different kind of weapon:
At first, I imagined this concept as a song performed live. I would build up a tasty, harmonically-ambiguous loop with my violin and cajon and offer the crowd or one lucky member of the crowd the choice of where to take the song after each portion of the story. My looper would be perfect for this kind of thing as I could have a holding loop while the decision was made and then, depending on which route through the story was chosen, I could build upon the loop accordingly. If the story was taking a dark turn, I’d have musical interludes to reflect this and be left with a darker-sounding loop. If we were rocketing towards a happy ending, I could make sure we’d end up in a major key. But oh my word…the words, the words…
And then 2020 happened.
The Shift
In March of this year in the UK, two things happened: the country went into lockdown and live gigging stopped. As I teach music aswell as perform and host open mics, the first meant that I then had buckets of free time to take on a seriously large creative project. The second meant that this seriously large creative project was perhaps better not geared towards a live gig.
I had a go at live-streamed gigs. I played five in total. The work to set up was double that for playing a gig in a venue. The excess of adrenaline after finishing them and being all on my own was unnerving. The viewing figures were lower for each consecutive one. I tired of it quickly. (but THANK YOU if you tuned in. The first and best one is available to watch here: https://www.facebook.com/353628931394008/videos/849729845544780)
At the end of April, I sat down in the sun, re-read the “AMAZING ADVENTURE SONG IDEA” note on my phone and did a fifteen minute brainstorming session on where to start. Remembering the only time I’ve ever punched somebody in the face in my life when I was seven years old and thinking about the (or possibly just my own) uncertainty surrounding if and when violence is necessary, I thought I had a perfect beginning. I began writing and completed sections 1, 1a and 1b and then I realised: there is no way anybody could ever perform this song live. Already having a rough plan of a structure for the song, I knew that for a song with just two sixteen bar verses, giving you only a binary choice after each section, well…let’s take a look…
What you can see above is a sketch of the first verse and only half of a second verse of a song with the baby structure mentioned above. If every section was to be four bars each – which I felt was a decent minimum to retain a flow to the song – that is already (1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32) x 4 = 252 lines of lyrics. To complete the second half of the second verse would add (64 + 128) x 4 bars making a total of 1020 lines of lyrics. And that’s a very short song. When I factored in the need to remember which answer led to which following section for every single section, I realised just how impossible this would be to do live!
So….that, and the impossibility of live gigs acknowledged, I made the decision to produce Clock Face as an interactive video.
I’m not going to tell you how I got round this apparently insurmountable, exponential beast because I think that will take some of the magic out of it for you.
The Process
From April to mid July, I spent at least two hours a day solidly writing. It was incredible. I have been bristling with excitement about this project from the moment I started writing and I remain to be so. In breaks from the writing and around my ever-dwindling work, I sketched out musical ideas to include using my loop pedal.
I have never had the time to attempt something like this before. Here is a small aside – there is a degree of sheepishness surrounding that for me. I am probably in the luckiest 1% of musicians and creatives who fit into the right categories to not be really struggling financially through the pandemic. Without the security of my part time college teaching job, I expect my Summer would have been very different and anguished. I feel very, very lucky. My heart very much goes out to all of my musician friends and I am here for you if I can help at all.
But back to the process. I kept the details of the project a secret apart from with those close to me and who I live with. If I tell too many people too much about songs I’m working on or demo half-finished pieces, I react quite strongly to criticism, however well-intentioned. I needed nothing to stand in my way of finishing this monster. So I finished the words (oh, the words) in early July and then set about what is always the smoother part of writing songs for me, the music. This phase of the project took me right up to about the end of August but here was where I started. Building appropriate phrases of music around each of the hundreds of sections of words, with a view to their development throughout the song was such a joy. Let me just say now, in the event you have one go through Clock Face and are somehow non-plussed: the wealth of musical surprises, easter eggs and twists that I have included in the package for your listening pleasure is truly my best achievement in my musical career to date. Play it again. Trust me.
But it didn’t stop there, creatively. Enter Alex again. When I’d finished the words, I gave a few select people a go through the story/ies. The first thing Alex said was that he thought it might need some kind of visual sweetener. To further draw the viewer/listener into the story, maybe I could think about illustrations? He was right. I spent the next few days drawing hundreds of illustrations. They are stick men. They look like this:
And incase you’re curious about what hundreds of A1 stickmen drawings now stashed under my bed (until the inevitable auctioning-off for thousands of pounds) look like…
At this point – around the 20th July – somehow, I was ready to start filming. I’d been in excitable daily conversation since the beginning with a good coder friend of mine who goes by the name of Mr Cat . My initial idea was to film every single section of the song in a jumbled up order on one 3 hour-ish video file that would then be edited to include post-production music and either annotated on YouTube to direct people precisely to the start of the next section within that one file or to accomplish this somehow on a different video-hosting site. Mr Cat told me this wouldn’t be possible and told me my best option by far would be to record each section separately. The increased work this involved was intimidating but I’m so glad he suggested it because the editing process has been so much more manageable doing it this way.
This was the first shoot, in the illustrious Firebird Studios:
It took us about 8 hours. I watched the first few back the next day. All seemed good. Then, with each further clip I watched, slowly it dawned on me that the shoot was unusable. That was the most crushing part of the whole process. There were focus indiscrepancies, bits cut off that were essential for the flow of the song, the framing and white balance changed with practically every clip. In retrospect, it was disastrous. I had already filmed a 6-section test shoot on my own a week or so previously and had had no intention of doing a test shoot of the entire project.
But there was absolutely no way I was going to have spent that much time putting this thing together and then compromise that much on its delivery. So, by the Friday of that week, I’d swallowed my humble pie, bucked up and prepared to shoot the whole thing again entirely on my own and using my phone and £5 plastic tripod! Again, I was lucky, in that we have a spare and empty room in the house I live in. I swotted up on an Android app called “footej”, set manual focus and white balance and set the room and my equipment up ready to go on the Friday night to start early Saturday morning. And that is the version that you are going to see when you play.
This section has been much longer than I intended already so I am going to wrap it up briefly by saying the following. The second shoot was spot on, albeit limited by a crap phone camera. The post-production phase of adding music and sound effects to every clip and then chopping each video out and exporting it took me up to about the end of August. Then I was faced with one final obstacle in the form of not knowing anybody with the coding knowledge to put Clock Face together to be playable how I saw it. A desperate Facebook post put me in touch with five different groups of people interested in and able to put it together for me on my shoestring budget. I went with Josh at Tetra Designs because he immediately understood several features that I was looking to include with minimal explanation. That was miraculous really. But I am enormously grateful to Marcus, Andi, Dan, Sam and John for looking into it for me.
OK then, what now?
Here are some things I wrote as notes on my phone whilst making this behemoth of a thing that I wanted to communicate at this stage:
This was either my accomplished version of going insane in lockdown or my insane version of being accomplished in lockdown.
Amongst other things, I’m hoping to show here what us creative people can do without the outlets for performance we’ve been used to and with time and the help of good friends. I hope this will stand as some kind of example of what we can do with technology that still incorporates crowd interaction, musicianship and all of the other skills we’ve learnt and honed before this massive blow that our industry has taken, is taking and is about to take.
I made this whole thing on amateur, old and “obsolete” technology, including Windows XP, a £300 Chinese violin, Serif MoviePlus (Serif no longer exist anymore) and my mobile phone camera. I’m not trying to say any of it is superior in any retro sense. More just noting it for my own pride really that I haven’t “bought in”. OK, read: I’m showing off.
Content-wise, I have tried to take the most circumspect perspective possible and distill, from that point of view, many many choices that viewers may even discover something about themselves from.
Clock Face will be out on Thursday 1st October 2020. It is like nothing you have ever seen, listened to or played. If this blog about it hasn’t blown your mind, the finished article will certainly do so. Thank you for reading.
And yes, I am already thinking about a sequel.
Mike Dennis 