Modern Musician

(Working Title)

Brandon Mattinlgy & TJ Syndram Version 1.0

Premise
Musicians are our modern day poets. In a single performance they can warm
our hearts with love and challenge our perspective of life.. Through their
songs and live shows – through their art – they awaken and extend our human
experience and understanding.

This series of short documentary films are an exploration of the life and soul of
the musical artist. The mind of a artists is an interesting landscape to explore –
full of bright genius and deep pangs. It takes special kind of person to produce
these pieces of art. Let’s explore the personality behind the performer.

To uncover the hidden side of these artists, we decided to take an alternative

approach to discovering their stories. We will hand the artists a tape recorder
with the intentional of having them create their own audio journal. Written on
the tape will be a single-word thematic prompt to get the discussion going.
The rest is up to the artist to lead the story.
Crafting Our Voice
The alternative approach of this project requires an acceptance of what’s given
to us with each artist. It’s up to them to fill the tape with their thoughts and
experiences throughout their day. A brilliant thought they have during their
morning coffee. A vent of frustration during their commute. A fear that’s keeping
them up at night.

It’s critical for us to not only submit to but embrace the entire process of
navigating the stories as they present themselves – such is the case with any
documentary film. This creates a new challenge and a new opportunity for us. By
removing the interview process, we are left behind in guiding the conversations
wavelength. But without anyone present with the artist we can capture an self-
conversation full of authentic, unfiltered streams of consciences. When the stage
is removed, who are they?
Stories
The heartbeat of these mini-docs are the musicians themselves. To cover a wider
tapestry of personal experiences, it’s important that we find artists with variety in
background, ethnicity, and genre.

We will provide a springboard topic for each of the artists to journal about. The
single-word prompts will be specific enough to guide the conversation while
staying general enough to cover a universal experience.   Passion, Pain, and
Legacy to name a few. We want them to play in a large sand box.
Execution
The process of creating these documentaries will all follow a similar
production schedule. We hand over the tape recorder, find the condensed
narrative structure and then film the visuals in light of the story.

We feel the most important thing to keep in mind for all the mini-docs is to
create a sense of continuity from film to film, while allowing each artist to
have their voice uniquely heard. The docs need to feel at home together,
but also have fresh, interesting perspectives and story beats. To keep
this sense of congruency, each film will begin by showing and opening
sequence of the artist received the hand recorder neatly packaged with
instructions to start their audio journal.
Live Performances
To complement the short documentaries we are going
to film acoustic, live performances. They goal of these
performances is keep them as intimate and honest as
possible. We want to audience to feel like they fumbled
upon this artist playing a song for themselves and no one
else.
Execution
If we want to keep things simple and honest, then we have to take take time
to consider finding the right location and setting for each artist. We don’t want
to see anything “staged” — no mics in the shot, no lights, no stage. Keeping
things stripped down will also create space for the artist to feel less pressure to
perform for camera. The goal is to catch an authentic moment with the musi-
cians as they live out the song in real-time. To do so we also we will be filming
a one-take format. We set the scene and have the musician play the song one,
maybe two times. The camera may float in an out of focus, the audio will sound
like the space, but we’ll embrace the imperfects and enjoy the unique moment
unfolding before us.
Onward
These films have the potential to show a new side of honesty
and depth from musicians. It goes without saying that their
musical contribution to our world is profound. Our hope it’s
to pay homage to their art and preserve their legacies.