Calgary Area Musicians Wanted!

For those who don't know it, I'm on the $100 Film Festival committee for the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF). Each year at the festival, they organize a series of Film/Music Explosions! What is a Film/Music Explosion! you might ask? Well, it's a collaboration between a local film artist and a local band, creating an original film for one of the band's songs. When the completed piece is screened at the festival in March, the band plays LIVE with the film. It's loads of fun and generates lots of excitement and anticipation during the film festival.

So if you're a local band or musician, the CSIF wants your proposal to create a film based on an original song! All styles accepted, no entry fees required. Proposals MUST include: concept or short film idea with rough script / storyboard & song demo.

Deadline: Friday, December 14, 2007

For more information, check out the $100 Film Festival MySpace page.

NaNoWriMo Soundtrack

You may start out by wondering what NaNoWriMo is... well, it stands for National Novel Writing Month which happens in November, so it started today. Next you may wonder why I'm posting about writing a novel on a music blog. Well, actually I'm not writing a novel, I'm working on my screenplay but that explanation is over at Weirdgrrl's Words so I won't bother repeating it here. But I digress...

Whenever I write I use a soundtrack. Each scene has a song associated with it in my head, so that even when I'm not sitting at my computer or with pen and paper in hand... that song comes on and I'm living in the scene and working out how things should unfold. That way, when I do actually sit down to write, the words just pour out like liquid thoughts and form themselves into a finished scene. So here's part of the soundtrack that I'm using this year:

My soundtrack is 16 songs in total at the moment. If nothing else, I highly recommend listening to the Marilyn Manson version of "Working Class Hero"; it has a much greater impact than the current insipid Green Day version... at least IMHO.

And based on the majority of my song titles, I'll give you three guesses as to the theme of my story... and the first two don't count!

Persian Teardrop

I posted about this on my personal blog before I had this music blog up and running but never received any response to it. I'm hoping that the readership over on this blog might be able to provide more help.

Some time ago, I downloaded a song that was entitled "Persian Teardrop" (currently added to My Music Box) but it turned out to be a brilliant mix of "Persian Love Song" by Dead Can Dance and "Teardrop" by Massive Attack with Elizabeth Fraser (of the Cocteau Twins). I had assumed it was a remix that was available on a CD somewhere but I've had no luck finding it. I'm now beginning to think it's a homemade remix that has just been circulating on the internet. I posted on the Massive Attack forums hoping someone there might know for certain, but no joy. So I figured I would try posting on my blog on the off chance that someone might stumble across it and know if (and where) I can find a legitimate copy of this remix.

Read more...

I'm desperate to use this music in a short film that I'm in post-production on but without this information, I don't know who to contact to ask about the festival rights and I do not want to use it without permission. Both because that's risky for me but also because it's not fair to the artists. So if anyone can help me out with this, I would really appreciate it.

P.S. Due to popular demand, I've also posted the lyrics to Persian Teardrop here.