Hold My Beer, The Documentary?

Just when you thought I was done posting about Hold My Beer, the film! Actually, this isn't about the narrative film (which you can watch here for free, please watch it and tell your friends, thank you), but a companion documentary piece that is the brainchild of Kyle, the drummer and coproducer in Second Player Score.

Kyle actually came up with the idea for a documentary a while ago, when we were still in preproduction for the narrative film. His thought was to interview the owners of breweries based in Vancouver, WA and ask them about how they got started, what kinds of challenges they've faced, how they overcame them, etc. - basically, their own real-life "Hold My Beer" moments. We didn't have time to produce it alongside the scripted film, but now we do! At least we think we do, so Kyle went ahead and contacted a bunch of brewery owners to arrange the interviews, starting with our friends Tom and Devon of Loowit Brewing (the picture above is of a test shoot Kyle and I did at Loowit this past weekend).

We think - or we hope, anyway - that it will make for interesting viewing, especially given the current state of the craft beer industry, which apparently is in a bit of an ebb but will hopefully make a robust recovery.

Stay tuned for more updates!

My Latest Filmmaking Experience (Including...Acting??)

I'm grateful to have had the opportunity this past weekend to help my friend Craig McCourry, an accomplished filmmaker and the founder of the Battle Ground Film House group, with his latest short film project!

Titled The Singularity Protocol, it's a period sci-fi/drama about two British soldiers during World War II who get trapped in an underground bunker and then subsequently make contact with an AI from the distant future (or not-so-distant from our perspective).

We shot it over two days at his studio in Battle Ground, WA, and it was a great experience. The main actors were from New York and one of the producers was from Palo Alto, but the rest of the crew were local to the Vancouver/Battle Ground area, most of us already having met before in the aforementioned Film House group.

I ran sound, which, thanks to the cool tech provided by Craig and the DP/cameramen James Chick and Joey Hammond, was a pretty straightforward gig - I just had to monitor the sound recorders to make sure the batteries didn't die mid-take or anything like that.

I also got to make my acting debut (my uncredited cameo in Hold My Beer doesn't count) as a Japanese soldier named Kenji Saito who gets shot by one of the main characters! By the time I appear, I'm already a corpse, so I didn't have any lines. However, I discovered that acting dead is a lot harder than you may think, as you have to hold your breath and lay completely motionless for what feels like a very long time. But it was still a lot of fun! I think I may have caught the acting bug...

Anyway, big thanks to Craig, James, Joey, Grace Mak, Kathy Wen, Mary McCargar, Marianna Cruz, Chris Crowley, Marty Meisner, actors Kenny and Mason, and everyone else who was there for making it an amazing experience!

Woohoo!

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is out today!

I pre-ordered my copy. Did you?

An Apology

Hi there! In this post, I'd like to issue an apology to the Google algorithm or whatever it is that manages this blog's traffic.

A bit of backstory: after diligently posting at least once a week (except for this one time in July 2021 when I missed a couple of weeks) since 2012, my view count had slowly but steadily increased to an average of around a hundred views per post. Which is not a lot, I suppose, but it was something.

Then, after I openly wondered if I was autistic/neurodivergent this past March, the average view count per post spiked up to around 200-300, remaining steady (and peaking at over 400 when I confirmed that I am, in fact, on the spectrum) every week.

That is, until last month, when I announced that I had joined another social media platform that will remain nameless here. Why will it remain nameless? Because after I wrote that post, my view count per post went down to around 100, then 60, then into the low double digits.

When that happened, I wondered: could it be due to the content of the posts? That didn't seem likely, as I had been writing about basically the same stuff as always - philanthropic events, anime theme songs, etc. So that left just one explanation: my blog was being punished by the controlling algorithm for having mentioned a rival platform.

I mean, what else could it be? Even if the algorithm had simply stripped away bot views, the overall reduction seems pretty precipitous to me.

So sumimasen deshita (one of many Japanese ways to say "I'm sorry"), Google/Blogger algorithm. I won't ever mention another platform again. Please forgive me and restore my readership.

Even if most of them are bots.

Cat Picture Placeholder Post

Because sometimes we all just need a good cat picture.

Right?

Special Request

I'm proud to announce that for the first time since Hold My Beer (or Try Again Tomorrow, if you're only counting feature-length scripts), I've completed the first draft of a screenplay!

It's called Special Request, and it's actually an expansion of a 5-minute short I wrote back in 2020 as an exercise for a screenwriting workshop conducted by Jonathan Stark and Tracy Newman, creators of According to Jim.

The short was a fictionalized account of the time when my son Torin asked me to write him a book (which was the genesis of the Joel Suzuki series). The funny thing is, I had previously submitted the original version of Hold My Beer for Jonathan and Tracy and the rest of the writers in the workshop to review, but after we did this exercise (which was meant to get us to write a new script from scratch), they actually liked it better than Hold My Beer.

Despite that, I never did anything with Special Request until just recently when I decided to expand it into a feature-length script, mostly just as a way to keep up my writing chops. As it turned out, since it's semi-autobiographical, it was fun and easy (and somewhat cathartic) to write, and in a couple of weeks, I had a 100-page draft. It's still fiction, but it's based on real-life people and events, telling the story of what led up to Torin asking me to write him a book and what happened after.

Will it be turned into a film one day? Who knows. But if it is, the big question will be: who will play "me"? Let me know your suggestions!

(I've always thought it funny that Brad Pitt played Billy Beane in Moneyball. It's like, "Hey Billy, we're making a movie out of this. Who do you want to play you?" and he says, "Brad Pitt, of course!" and everyone has a good laugh but then it actually happens.)

Why Are Anime Theme Songs So Good?

If you're a fan of anime like me - or even if you're not - you may have noticed that anime theme songs totally rock. Or "slap," as the kids say. Do they still say that? Or is that a Millenial term, supplanted by another word that Gen Z uses? (to an old Gen Xer like me, Millenials and Gen Z are all lumped together in the "kids" category.) 

Tonikaku ("anyway"), what was I saying? Oh yeah, anime theme songs: SO GOOD. I enjoy them so much, often playing YouTube mixes of them while I do chores, that at one point I decided to try to figure out why they are so good. This reverse-engineering process led me to a couple of interesting discoveries:

1. A lot of anime theme songs (and just J-Pop/Rock songs in general) tend to use a similar structure that goes something like this:

- Instrumental or vocal introduction

- First verse

- Pre-chorus that increases the tension

- HUGE CHORUS

- Instrumental or vocal break (usually 1/2 of the original intro)

- Second verse, usually with an additional element that differentiates it from the first verse

- Pre-chorus

- HUGE CHORUS

- Instrumental solo

- Bridge

- HUGE CHORUS

- Outro (usually a reprise of the intro)

Two songs that are good examples of this structure (and are personal favorites of mine) are "Shunkan Sentimental" by Scandal (from Full Metal Alchemist) and "Zankyou Sanka" by Aimer (from Demon Slayer).

2. Anime theme songs tend to have vocal melodies that "tell a story" in the chorus, as opposed to a lot of western-hemisphere songs that rely on the "repeat the same line 4 or 8 times" method. A classic example of the "tell a story" melody is the "Happy Birthday" song (sing it to yourself and you'll see what I mean):

- Happy birthday to you (introduction, like you're setting out on a journey)

- Happy birthday to you (rising action)

- Happy birthday, dear Brian (climax)

- Happy birthday to you (resolution)

A couple of good examples of this are "Blue Bird" by Ikimono-Gakari (from Naruto: Shippuden) and "Gurenge" by LiSA (also from Demon Slayer). These songs also utilize variations of the song structure I went over in point #1 above.

In addition to making them rock/slap/whatever, utilizing these techniques allows these songs to be shortened down without diluting their effectiveness into the one-minute-or-so range that animes will use over their intro or closing credits. So keep them in mind if you want to write a song that would make a good theme for an anime (and optionally, maybe also consider learning Japanese)!