A few months back me and Dan Tomlinson decided to make a song and a music video. This was riDICKulously new territory for us. Here’s how we did it.

THE MUSIC

“Sucking Dicks” came around completely by accident. The seed was planted on February the 4^th 2011, my birthday. Dan had been blurting out small improvised songs for a few days now, and on this particular night he came up with the following:

“It must be a lot of work…….GIVING BLOW JOBS FOR A LIVING”.

It stuck. We sang it all night. Aside from that, we had some drinks, ate some cake and got over it.

We’d talked about creating a song for a long time now but he had no idea where to start. After some research I discovered Magix Music Maker, an entry-level music program that was quite easy to use. The next time Dan came round I thought I’d spend five minutes showing him the basics to generate some inspiration and excitement, and it wasn’t long before we were singing the aforementioned line to various loops and samples.

Another five minutes passed and we were still at it. Now we were fiddling with individual notes trying to make these magical lyrics work in the medium of song. Without thinking, these lyrics evolved over the evening to become the now familiar:

“I’m sucking dicks for a living, I’m sucking those dicks for a living, I’m sucking those dicks for a…”.

By the end of the night we had the chorus completed, sung completely out of key, but otherwise exactly as you’ll hear it today.

Progress developed as slowly as this throughout. I think the next day all we did was managed to manually tune each word from our god-awful singing. Every day I’d put the current version of the song on my iPod and listen to it all day at work, then every night we’d make small changes based on the days thoughts and feelings about it. This wasn’t the fine crafting of a masterpiece (as you’ll know if you’ve heard the song), this was two guys who didn’t know a lot about what the hell they were doing and making slow progress. And of course we didn’t take one second of it seriously, but the more we did it the more fun it became. I’m glad it became such a labour of love, otherwise it’d have never gotten finished.

I’ve never sung before. I mimed even when we sang as a class in school. Doing this was embarrassing as hell. Luckily auto tune software is easily obtainable these days and pretty easy to use. We sang all of our lines in to a camcorder mic. That was literally how ropey the production was. A bit of noise reduction and a touch of echo though and you’re a regular Chesney Hawkes.

We hit huge stumbling blocks when it came to the lyrics. For a few weeks only the first rap was done and we didn’t know what to do for the second bit. Due to the time between recordings you might be able to tell I used a different voice for each bit, and I had to manually deepen the pitch of one to match the other.

The whole second half of the song was tricky. We wanted the song to get bigger and bigger as it went on but we couldn’t work out what to do. We had high speed rapping, a bit where Dan sang about losing a filling during the act, and an apology to our parents. Eventually the whole FBI bit was improvised on the spot by Dan in one go, which is why it doesn’t really contain any jokes. It was just too funny a moment to change anything about it though.

To get the big group singing section at the end we’d planned on dragging a few mates in. To get an idea of how it’d sound we laid down a test track featuring me and Dan doing various different comedy voices, all layered on top of each other. Turned out it sounded fine like that so we left it. Every single voice in the whole song is either me or Dan.

The song took about three weeks to create. I’m dead happy with it. It’s so all over the place, like a low quality Bohemian Rhapsody. And I’m annoyed we didn’t fit more jokes in to the lyrics for the second half of the song, but hey ho.

The song was never supposed to appear on iTunes. Out of curiosity and interest I’d started to wonder how unsigned bands I’d known had gotten on to decent online music stores. I found a company called Ditto Music. You basically pay £5 for them to host your song and you got 60% of the profits. It suddenly became hilarious to me that for this price you could write a song about fellatio and put it in the ‘shops’ in amongst the likes of big budget chart toppers. Well, it was too funny an opportunity to ignore. It’ll also appear on Amazon and Spotify at some point too, but they work a LOT slower than the folk at iTunes.

THE VIDEO

The next step was the video. The brief was the same as the song, nothing graphic and no steering from the words “Sucking Dick”. The only time we did was both in the lyrics and in the video simultaneously where I say, “Sucking on a DONG” whilst doing the actions. You can forgive us one slip.

This could have been our most planned piece visually as it’s the only time we storyboarded the whole thing. You can see it here (complete with the original end to the song, and a quick flash of Dan in the dentist chair which was intended for the filling bit):

Our first days filming was to take place at Weston Super Mare on the beach. Me, Dan and my fiancée Hannah booked time off work one cold Wednesday and took a train there. As lazy film makers this is more commitment than we’d usually put in to something! We’d also bought shirts and white shorts especially for the occasion but it was so cold that we couldn’t bring ourselves to wear them. Really, it was probably the coldest I’ve ever been without exaggeration. Initially we could only film in quick bursts before having to take a break and attempt to get warm again. Hannah would literally hold a mountain of coats during the takes and then throw them back on us when the camera was no longer filming. LUCKILY after spending the day on Weston Pier we came out to find it had gotten warm enough to grab a few extra shots. This was very lucky as we’d have come away with hardly anything otherwise.

The next step was to film the chorus parts on the park bench, which we did the following weekend. What was weird about this day was that it was literally just me and Dan and nobody else (there’s usually at least three of us when we do this sort of thing, but usually more). Not only that, but it was a Saturday morning on the first ‘warm’ day of the year so the park was pretty busy. We’d have to start the camera, run to the bench and wait for minutes at a time until the pathway we were filming on was completely free of park-goers. It took a LONG time but there was no way we were gonna do all that singing and dancing in front of any form of stranger.

The same day we managed to get the rocker stuff done in the same park. Dan was unhappy as his wig kept falling off, which is why he’s a more ridged rocker than some would expect. There’s also that thing where you decide it’ll be funny to play the guitar shirtless on a cliff top, but when it comes to the day you’ve got to walk all the way to the park shirtless with a guitar strapped to your body. Cue lots of park-goers giving funny looks.

The next day was dedicated to the dancers, who were my fiancée Hannah and the other usual Guksack go-to’ers Jenny and Sammy. They all refused requests to do it in swimwear or underwear, but you have to ask don’t you? We shot all of this in our bedroom with a crude green screen made out of several sheets of green card BluTak’d to the walls.

You need a lot of light for these types of shots so we used every lamp we could find, and one security light. It still wasn’t enough. Here’s a little look at our “studio” for the day:

Jenny used to teach ‘Street Dance’ so we asked if she could choreograph some form of dance for us, which really added to the video a lot! My big regret was that there wasn’t enough room or light for the dancers to be seen as well as I’d have liked.

Worst part of the day was dragging up to play my “mum”. I just looked horrible. That, and we’d lost the keys to the windows in the bedroom. It was hot, hot, HOT with all that dancing under all those lights.

The weekend after that was for everything else. We got Jason in for the FBI scenes on the Saturday. It was one of those effortless days where you only shoot for 2 hours, get a ton of coverage, and you spend the whole time in hysterics. This picture in particular was the precise moment a bee flew between Dan and Jason during a rehearsal. You’ve got to love moments like those.

Sadly due to ill-timing on our part we had to cut a lot of good stuff out of the final edit. The best bit was Jason materialising from a pile of dead leaves. You can watch that later.

Sunday was for the group shots at the end. We really didn’t want to get loads of our friends in as they’re our first audience we aim for, so didn’t want to spoil the surprise of the whole production (it’s worth noting that we kept this whole project a secret from most people we knew). We ended up just filming the cast we’d already used (with Hannah’s brother being dragged in as a last minute favour) on a green screen over and over in various costumes. We didn’t have enough to go behind our legs so if you look closely you’ll see where I’ve had to cut them out from the background rather crudely.

As with most of our projects there’s always a ton of post production to get though. We didn’t think there would be this time around, but all the green screen work took a long time to get through thanks to the crudity of how it was all shot.

Eventually we set ourselves a self-proposed deadline. Sometimes you have to, otherwise it’ll never get done. The last part we hadn’t thought of was the very last line. Dan just said “Oh, just have me fly in as a cherub”, and that was that. An hour or so later we were rendering ready for YouTube! Unfortunately my computer is a bit pants so I could only render it out at 720p, even though I’d been working at 1080p throughout. I’m sure nobody will notice, we’re hardly using the best cameras here.

Release

I’m dead proud of this song/video. There was a point half way through where we’d realised “Hang on, we’ve just made a song about sucking dicks. Shouldn’t we have done something a little less rude?”. I guess there’s still a part of us that thinks that, but never mind. It seemed to go down better than expected.

The video got to nearly 10,000 hits in the first two days online which is the fastest success we’ve ever had. It also had the most ‘dislikes’ we’ve ever had, but that’s what you expect when you put something of this nature online.

As for the actual song, well I’m still waiting on results for that. All we know is that it made it to No79 in the UK Comedy Music Charts. Look, we’re ahead of Weird Al! Hilarious!

Here’s a little montage of behind the scenes moments from the shoot:

I’ve decided I’m going to turn this blog in to a real genuine blog about stuff I get up to. I used to love doing it when I used to run a film making website, and then there were the Myspace days…yeah, that thing.

I’ll blog about life, but I’ll mainly use it to talk about my film projects. So if another film gets uploaded to YouTube and I haven’t written anything about it here then please give me a nudge.

Cheers!