THIS IS HELL

INTRO

This is Hell is the first single from my album Et cetera. I’m looking to have the single and video released Friday, March 7th, but ideally it would be ready by the Friday before, February 28th. Not a whole lot of time from now, I know.

I have budgeted $800 for outside help on this. Please let me know if that works for you or what a more appropriate rate would be.

The story of the song began in 2020 with me shit-talking LA but declaring that I’d never leave. It’s full of tropes and jokes about the town and the people in it.

Over the past week, however, I saw a lot of people not from here assuming things about this place that were incorrect and much of it seemed insensitive. It really pissed me off, which I guess is the Texan coming out in me…

Anyway, it kind of jarred loose this idea about how to visualize this song: there’s one part about LA living this gilded life full of color and vibrancy and then the Fox News version of LA full of erosion and misery, as if LA would be better if it were flattened because “we deserve it.”

Most of the music video will be shot and animated (poorly) by me and take place in very colorful, lo-fi settings like these photos:

However, the introduction and both choruses “so I guess This is Hell” need to be starkly different; colorless, fast-paced, and larger-than-life. And I need a lot of help figuring out what that would be. I’d prefer Hell not be depicted as actual “hell”, but I’m up to hear any ideas. There was a thought of an earthquake taking me underground, but that may be too direct.

I haven’t storyboarded everything out, so maybe figuring that out for my portions could help both of us.

THE MUSIC

A lot of the music on the album has a lot of elements of that weird period of the mid-90’s in between the grunge and alternative waves of rock that I get so much of my musical taste from (Weezer, Cake, Presidents of the USA, etc.), so a lot of the visual ideas I’ve had would match that pseudo-low effort look that a lot of those groups had.

This is Hell Intro is a 1950’s-era advertisement for the city of Los Angeles [on the album, it’s called A Message from the Los Angeles Tourism Board].

Duration: 23 seconds

Los Angeles! A bustling, metropolitan desert oasis.

Minutes from the beach! Minutes from the mountains! And seconds from a nervous breakdown.

Do you like treating people poorly? Then this is the place for you!

Come for the glamor, and stay because you can’t afford to leave.

This is Hell is, like I said, all over the place genre-wise. There are country elements as well as surf rock and motown-esque ideas. But the big change I need help with is in the punk rock choruses.

Timestamps: 1:10 to 1:24 and 2:19 to 2:33

Duration: 28 seconds between 2 sequences of 14 seconds each

So I guess This is Hell

I guess This is Hell I’m living in

Oh my god we’re in Hell

[back to my video] and I like it

AESTHETIC DIRECTION

When putting together the introduction to this song (which will be a standalone track on the audio versions), I thought of these 1950’s animated ads that made things look super glamorous but not have to actually show anything existing in real life. I think matching the color and choppy movement could get the job done well enough - all the corner-cutting measures the animators of the time would have taken.

I also think many of the characters I’ve seen you design fit this aesthetic really well. Feel free to re-use any characters/backgrounds you have that you think would fit without getting either of us in trouble.

SPiritual direction

These animated music videos always stuck out to me as some of my favorites. They had a lyrical message that wasn’t entirely matched by what was on screen, so the two could be appreciated separately. I also like the risks taken with all of these - like they were clearly done just on the cusp of the technology being good enough to do all of this stuff more believably.