Hello all.

I’ve gone and co-made another short film under the Cat cat Productions name. And you can see it now! The film is embedded below. Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think. Leave a comment on either this site or on YouTube!

Summary: Four different students spend Prom Saturday retaking their SATs, unaware they will mix with each others’ lives as much as their spices.

More: 

Since this is also a blog post (and I don’t want to just embed the film and call it day), I’ll share some tidbits about the making of the movie. Just like the past eight Cat cat Productions movies, Ralph Blanchard and I have shared writing, producing, directing, and editing duties. We’ve also acted in every single movie (this time I play a take on Pretty in Pink‘s evil Steff).

I share many credits on the film, but I thought go into more depth about two of them that are most interesting!

Titles

Usually on our Cat cat projects, if one of us really, really wants something for the film, it is their responsibility to bring it to life. For whatever reason, I was just compelled to get the titles in this film to match those of The Breakfast Club exactly, and mostly in their subtle jiggling. Titles are known for staying on the screen and not moving at all, but for whatever reason, the title cards of older films seemed to jitter and shake ever so slightly. (This might have to do with projectors not lining up every single frame of the title perfectly . . . or something. Just a guess! I should look into this!) This jiggling happens with the beginning titles of The Breakfast Club, and I wanted to nail this look 100%. To go about this, I imported footage of The Breakfast Club’s titles, then used a computer program to record the “jiggle-ness” of the letters exactly. The amount they moved, how long they were in each position, etc. Using the same program, I applied the exact same jigglynes to my own text. And this is why, in The Brat Snack, the opening titles jiggle slightly (don’t let anyone say we didn’t pay attention to detail!). Hopefully this gives the film a subtle 80s-like quality. Even if people don’t notice outright, their brains might!

Lyrics by…

As we all know, I’ve been making music for quite a while. But like 97% metal music. Sadly, The Brat Snack would call for no “heavy metal vomit party” type music. So I’d have a real challenge ahead of me. Typically, I find myself terrible at doing a “topline”, which is a fancy industry word for the vocal melody. I can do the background music just fine, just can’t pair melodies with it. Metal requires only grunts and, well… more grunts, so for The Brat Snack, I’d be traversing out of my comfort zone (y’know, like, the kids in The Breakfast Club.)

Three songs would need lyrics for the film. The first song was a spoof on “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds, so that was more or less easy. Just kind of do the same melody as the real song and change up the words. For “I Need My Bangers” and “My Sausage Making King”, I would have to do my own original vocal melody. In order to do this, I played the backing tracks over and over, and had my guitar there with me, just plucking away, noodling melodies. When something sounded interesting, I would follow that thread, and hammer something out until it sounded great. Once I had the vocal melody, and I knew how many syllables I had to work with, I wrote the lyrics. I think I did an all right job! Of course, the singers really brought the songs to life and were amazing.

But really, with these silly sausage songs under my belt, maybe I have what it takes to topline some more songs (I do have a few non-metal songs laying around in draft form…hmmm)! Now that The Brat Snack is over, I have some time to work on other things. Let the mulling begin.

The Brat Snack. Streaming now!