UPDATE: 'KNOCK' SCRIPT GETS PRODUCED.

A few months ago I was commissioned to write a script for a third year film student. Over the summer it was produced and has recently been edited and released.

A young man with crushing social anxiety finds a way to communicate via Morse code.

When a young girl moves into his apartment complex Patrick is initially very shy, but when he sees a documentary on the television showing how people once communicated without speech, he sees an opportunity to overcome his disability and develop a relationship with the girl of his dreams.

You can read the script here.

The full film is available to watch below:

HOW TO: PUT ON A FESTIVAL IN YOUR BACK GARDEN

Introduction:

Festivals are a great way to bring together friends and family, to participate in your community or just get drunk with your mates somewhere that isn’t the local pisser.

I’m a big fan of them, and I think live music deserves a place to be enjoyed outside. Putting on a festival in your back garden is actually a surprisingly cheap and easy way to make your own entertainment, and if done right can be a great experience for performers and audience members alike.

Part One, The Leg Work:

Acts:

First things first, no festival is going to be a success without a decent rostra of acts. I would suggest finding out where your local open mics are; go down and listen to the artists, see what you think might work for the sort of festival you’re putting on.

Who will work for the beginning of the day when everyone’s arriving and want to ease into the experience? Who’s going to get the crowd going after? Who do you want for the end of the evening when everyone’s had a few beers and want something loud to dance to?


It’s really important that you get to know your local scene, write down the acts names and a brief description of their sound, then start making lists of a rough running order.

Setting a date:

Once you’re confident that you have an idea of the sort of acts you want to put on, it’s time to set a date.

Leave yourself at least three months to get it done, as although this may seem like a long time, things will go wrong and people will drop out. Plan for the unexpected, so that when it happens you will be prepared.

Putting together your team:


Running the festival will be incredibly difficult without a dedicated team to help out.

You can take on one or more of these roles, but the more you do, the more work it will take, and the less likely you’ll be available for emergencies. Remember as well, that you're there to have a good time, not just to work!

The main people you will need are:

An Artist liaison:
Someone to keep an eye on when the acts are arriving and when they need to go on stage. This is important to stop acts running over and sets having to be cut short. To this person the running order is king.

A Sound Man:
This doesn’t have to be a professional, especially if you’re just putting on acoustic artists, but should be someone with a working knowledge of sound. Having someone with an ear at the desk will improve the experience immeasurably for everyone involved.

A compare:
Having someone on stage to introduce acts and keep the audience warm in-between will really increase the energy of your festival.
This is the perfect job to give to your wise-cracking, outgoing, oft drunk friend. If he’s up for getting in front of a microphone and making a fool of himself, then he’s the perfect guy (or gal) for the job.

Litter picker/runner/general dogsbody:
It’s always good to have a few mates at hand who are willing to help out in any way they can. Having someone like this when an emergency happens can be a lifesaver.

NOTE: Make sure you delegate as much as possible. Many hands make light work, and it will be far more fun if you're not running around every five minutes!

Part Two: Acquisition of Equipment:

Once you have everyone on board, you’re going to need to acquire some items:

Items you will need:

• A PA System
• Microphones and stands
• Gazebo (something to cover the electronics)
• Lights
• Leads (Electric plugs, XLR’s)

PA System:
This is by far the most important part of any successful festival, but is the most commonly ignored/overlooked. A decent sound system will boost the entertainment value massively and will create the atmosphere and sense of ‘festivity’ that we’re looking to create. If you’re going to invest money anywhere, let it be here!

For Hydefest I used my own pair of Stagepas 400i’s. They set me back about £600 and came with their own cables and amplifier (very useful!). You, however, may not want to buy your own system, and should be able to hire a PA for around £50.

Go for the best quality you can afford, I’d advise not to go for anything over the power of 300watts; you’d have to be very careful not to blow people’s heads off with anything higher, especially if catering for a small garden.


Microphones, stands and cables:
I’m sure there are services that will hire these out, if not you can pick up some sets for around £100. In my experience an expensive microphone means nothing if it’s being put through bad amplification, so don’t worry about spending the mega bucks if you’ve got a good PA.

Gazebo (something to cover electronics):
When putting on live music you’re going to be working with electricity, it is therefore important to make sure nothing meets with water, and (especially in England) you can’t guarantee that it wont rain.

I just used a simple gazebo loaned to me from my parent’s garage, using electrical tape to keep things off the grass and a plastic groundsheet wherever there was no choice but to have them running along the floor.

If you have more money/resources/space you might consider putting up a large canvas tent or even hiring an inflatable stage.

Electrical leads:
Make sure you have enough leads to connect everything together, and if you’re not sure, get extra!


Lights:
If you’re planning your festival to go on into the evening then you’re going to need some way of lighting the garden when it gets dark. I was lucky enough to have a good friend who lent me some of his up-lighters, these were attached to the top of the Gazebo with cable ties.

Part Three, Dressing Up Your Festival:

Now you’ve put in the leg work you can begin having some fun with your festival.

Think what themes you enjoy or imagine your community will enjoy, what sorts of images do your community usually go for, do they go for a pirate type thing? Maybe something a little more space-age? Or perhaps a hippy look?

The street the house I held the festival in was called Hyde Abbey Road, and so I decided to call mine Hydefest. Going along with this idea I went for a Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde theme, with one being the person we are at work and the other who we are at play.

With this in mind I got in touch with an illustrator friend of mine and commissioned her to do a painting based on this idea. What she came back with was excellent, I then sent that image to another friend of mine who is a graphic designer and ended up with a large high-quality, professional image.

This was the festival’s brand, and what I used to promote it to the guests. You can see the finished image above.

I then got friends to throw drapes over the walls, bought some fairy lights and candles in jars for when it got dark and a few incense to give off a pleasant smell.

Do you have any friends who are artists? Maybe you know someone who owns a print shop? This is a great way to get a community of people together working for a common non-for-profit cause. Have fun with your own ideas and use the resources you have available to give your festival its own special flavour.

Part Four, Bringing Everything Together:

A month Before:
A month or so before your festival send out letters to your neighbours letting them know what you’re planning.

Tell them the exact time when things are happening, and crucially when they will end, and invite them along. This will foster a community feeling and help to avoid any trouble.

A Week Before:
A week before the event, send out messages to all of the artists with the following information:

1. The exact time when they are playing.
2. The exact specifications of the equipment you have available and what you expect them to bring.
3. How long their set is.
4. How long before they play you expect them to arrive (I usually say about 30 mins).
5. Who to find and talk to when they arrive, and what that person looks like (yellow shirt perhaps).
6. A thank you for agreeing to play, some idea of what you expect the weather to be like and how much you are looking forward to seeing them on the day.

Make sure you also get in touch with your team. This is the time when people may drop out, doing it a week before will give you plenty of time to find a replacement.

On The Day:
Some things to bear in mind on the day:

1. Buy a few crates of beers for your artists and anyone else who’s helping out. They’ll really appreciate the effort and it’s an easy way to say thanks.
2. Print out the running order and put it in places where people will see it, it’ll help the guests to get an idea of who they’re listening to and the artists gain publicity.
3. Put bin-bags out where they’re easily accessible, it will help cut down on the cleaning the day after!

Part Five, D-Day

Everything’s ready to go, now go and enjoy it!

Hydefest was a great festival, and everyone had a fantastic time. If you follow some or all of the advice I've posted I'm sure you could easily do something just the same.

Get a few mates together, put on some great music, sit back and relax!

Cheers!

If you've enjoyed this guide to putting on a back garden festival please feel free to share on social media/tell your friends.



If you do take the plunge, or have any questions, feel free to contact me at:

thomasdulieu@googlemail.com

Happy festivaling!

The Snail Collector (Short Play)

It is night-time, a man is hunched, walking and scanning the floor. He has a small, dirty brown bucket.

JULES: Hmm, mmm.

He picks something off the floor and drops it into the bucket.

JULES: What beautiful, wonderful specimens. Oh, look here!

He rushes to the other side of the stage and picks up something else, admires it in his hand and carefully places it in the bucket.

JULES: Oh, how lovely. Slimy, hmm.

He licks his lips.

GICQUEL enters stage right, he has a flash-light and is dressed in a railway workers uniform. He watches JULES. JULES shuffles across the stage and picks up another.

GICQUEL clears his throat. JULES is startled.

JULES: Oh, my! Oh, hello there young man, what a wonderful night for a stroll don't you think?

GICQUEL: I'm... not sure you're meant to be in here. It's not open to the public.

JULES: Oh, I wouldn't worry about that my boy. Us gentlemen can enjoy a nights stroll on an evening with such sweet charms can we not? With such wonderful sweet charms.

GICQUEL: I'm... I'm with the railway, I'm meant to be guarding the tracks, I think you need to leave.

JULES: Oh, nonsense, nonsense. Come, come, see these wonderful specimens, these wonderful slimy treats.

He gestures for GICQUEL to come closer.

JULES: Oh, don't be shy my boy, don't be so silly, come here and see my treats, look into my wonderful bucket.

GICQUEL comes closer, he looks into the bucket.

GICQUEL: There's lots of snails.

JULES: Yes, wonderful snails. Don't you love the way the wriggle and slime? Isn't it just a wonder of nature, and oh the smell. The wonderful smell of stinky snails, in my lovely snails bucket. Would you like to hold one?

GICQUEL: Look sir, I really think you ought to leave.

JULES: Come on my boy! Hold one of my sweet snails in your dainty manly palm.

GICQUEL: No. It's time for you to leave, this is... private property.

JULES: Just a little touch. Come, they're so smooth and squidgy, fluffy even. Come, let me put my snail on your cheek.

GICQUEL: Hmm

JULES: On your palm then. Here, hold your hand out... There we are my wonderful boy, not so difficult now was it?

CURTAIN

Brock Cain

Near the end of 2013, around Christmas time, I wrote a short radio play in a free-writing session about a big butch man who turns out underneath to be a softie.

The play lay dormant on my desktop for some time, until a few months ago when a good friend of mine told me their group desperately needed a script for a production they had to film imminently. I searched my mind for something suitable and, well, a radio play is very easily adaptable to screen.

It's slapdash, it's rough, it was filmed in about three hours, but it's mine.

I actually ended up performing in it as well, and if you like it, we can probably make more.

So, without further ado. I present to you, Brock!

Elliot Porter and The Missing Pieces

The latest big event in my life has to be joining the fantastic Elliot Porter as a drummer in The Missing Pieces. Give his stuff a listen below:

There have been many great adventures, too many to recount to you in the few words I've allowed myself, but for now I'll just leave you with a few of my favourite pictures from the past year or so and the news that on the 29th of this month we will be playing a huge gig at The Sebright Arms in London to promote the release of a new EP!

If you'd like to come and check out the gig this month pop over to it's Facebook page where you can pick up all the details!

A Whole New Project (Comedy Shorts)

For some time now I've been having little brain waves, funny things that come to me just before I go to bed, when I'm in a zombiefied morning stupor or, for some strange reason, when I'm bent double in the kitchen suffering from a severe hangover; and, when I can, I've written these down in a note-pad or on a scruffy piece of paper.

Recently I collected the best of these pieces together and decided that I had just enough to do a few episodes, recorded in a radio-style segment, that I planned on releasing upon the judging ears of the general public. 

So, through a haze of a severe cold (arrgh, my face feels like it's being pulled on by a small child, my eyes are watering, and someone's filled my nose with tar!) I set about getting down something that I hoped would make people laugh, and, hopefully, make them want to subscribe and listen to more.

Here's what came out:

Writing and recording a three track EP.

So I thought people might like to know the story of how I went about creating Harmonic Distortion.

 

  This article may come in useful for those of you thinking of doing something similar or anyone who's just generally interested in this sort of thing.

 
01: Background

From the age of 15 I messed around a lot with a free music editing program called Garageband, something that you get free with apple macs.

With this software I learned the basics of recording, using an old microphone I owned and a friends mixing board that he left round my house.

I spent a very long time recording each track and actually managed to get something like an EP out of it.

Now jump ahead to 2011

Last year I was in Derby and had a house of my own, so I decided to offer a service recording demo songs for singer/songwriters so that they can get a gist of what they sound like. I called this small business Blackbird Recording and recorded a couple of local artists.

 I charged very little and people seem to be fairly happy with my work. Doing this helped me to hone my skills and finally develop an 'ear' for mixing tracks and getting all of the parts to sit well with each other in the mix.

Here's one of the tracks, a cover I did with singer/songwriter Tim Gough, if you're at all interested:



This period was a major turning point in my life, when I decided to drop out of uni and pursue a career in music.

It's at this time, where I seemed to be floating in a strange form of limbo, neither at uni nor at work, that I decide to record some music. I have the skills, I can play a couple of instruments, I can sing, and there's nothing else to do; so why not?



 02: Recording the tracks

1st Stage - Writing 

So I set up all my equipment in the front room of my shared house (a space that no-one seemed to be using) and got to work on writing some songs.

 I found for me the best way to do this was to grab my acoustic and record some riffs, getting down the main body of the song before writing the lyrics or 'filling it out' with other parts.

Here's a photo of what the room looked like in that first stage:

It took me around two weeks to get five songs that I was happy with, all totally written and with lyrics.

It seemed like the hard part was over, and I felt like the work was almost done, all I needed to do now was re-record the guitar and add bass and drums. Easy peasy right? Right?


2nd Stage - 'filling out' the tracks

Guitar 

So after messing around with a couple of different sounds I settled on the one that I have now. I played the riff on my acoustic guitar and ran it into a distorted amplifier with a clip on pickup (you can see this set-up on the cover of the EP).

 I recorded the riff separately, once on the left channel (meaning it plays only in the left ear) and then on the right, this, I hope, gave it a full sound that sort of fills your mind with distortion.

I then recorded the riff on the center channel (Both left and right ears equally) with a clean sounding acoustic guitar, and turned the volume right up. This I found gave the riff a punchy edge that cut through the sound of the distortion and gave it the kick that I felt it needed.

I thought this would be fairly easy and not too time consuming, but when you're recording using garageband it's not so easy to 'fix it in the mix' and I really didn't want the robotic sound of looping, so every take I did had to be without too many obvious mistakes.

Now, if you worry too much about making mistakes, you will make them, and so you have to get yourself into a sort of 'zen' state of mind where you're not worrying too much but still concentrating hard.

One of the main things I learned from this experience is that you need to know when to take breaks. You may not feel physically tired but you're concentrating hard, and when you start to make lots of mistakes it's time to take a break and get a cup of tea.

 If you don't keep an eye on this it's easy to get frustrated with what you're doing and you end up putting yourself even further back; or giving up entirely.

Solo Guitar

Although my tracks were starting to come together now I felt there were parts where there was nothing going on and where people could get bored of the music, this was something I was keen to stop from happening, the songs were designed to grab the listeners attention and retain it till the end, hopefully.

Because of this I asked a friend who I knew to be a fantastic guitarist to some over and record some solos for me.

I simply played him the song, told him which part I wanted the solo in and he did the whole thing in one take.

Tim Gough it turns out is pretty good at busting out the crunchy rock solos that I wanted and I'd just like to take a second here to say cheers.

Vocals

When all of this was over the time had come to re-record the vocals. This is a whole different kettle of fish because, just as you hate the sound of your voice played back to you, so singers hate the sound of theirs. So when recording your own vocals you have to stop yourself from becoming too self concious and giving up entirely.

I helped myself somewhat by double-tracking the vocal line (singing the same thing twice and putting it slightly to the left and the right) in the same way that John Lennon did in most of the Beatles tracks. This gives it a slightly softer edge and made me feel a bit better. I didn't use this technique in Twisted Ditty however, as I wanted a slightly rawer sound.

 Drums

So I had some fairly solid sounding tracks and the time had come to get a beat behind them. So I lugged all of my equipment (Mixing board, four microphones, laptop and cables) in a huge rucksack on a bus back home. And set them up on my drum kit in the garage.

I could've got a much better sound out of the drums if my fire-wire had worked (not sure if it was the wire or my very old laptop). The plan was to set the two overheads to come out left and right, with the bass and snare in the middle. This worked for all of about half a minute, and I got very excited for a short space of time.

Unfortunately my software didn't allow for multi-track recording and so the whole thing had to come out mono, I did my best to mix it before hand on my board but in the end the drums had to sit fairly low in the mix.

But hey, at least they're there.

Bass

The last thing that needed doing was the bass line. I'd already tried beforehand to add bass just by plugging the guitar straight into the board and using that as an amplifier, but this didn't sound very good. I was particularly lucky however to have a friend with a house free and another friends bass and amp already set up.

And so I pounced upon the opportunity and set up my little portable studio in his house, thumping away at the bass while he played civilization on his computer next to me.

Recording the Bass was probably the most enjoyable part for me as the tracks were starting to come together at this point and I'd done a bit of tweaking in between. I recorded them from the amp and used a pick to give it a more punchy sound, you can hear this best in Sweetheart. I also used a lot of slides to give the tracks a feeling of movement, you can hear this most prominently in the chorus of Devils Maiden and the verse of Twisted Ditty.

3rd Stage - Mixing

Putting the final touches to the mixing took a lot longer than I first anticipated.

This was, mainly, due to me being a horribly lazy procrastinator. But the other reason was, and this may not be something that happens to anyone else, I was just sick and tired of hearing the songs. After listening to them over and over again and trying desperately to get every little thing into place I'd lost all passion for them.

In the end I had to just say I was happy with how they were because I just couldn't sit at the computer any longer.

And so I exported the Mp3 Files, and those are the ones you can hear today.

If you'd like you can download the whole thing free here.

Cheers for reading.