I’ve got to get myself back into writing and practicing writing as much as I can. Motivation to sit down and do so will no longer be such a big problem. Most of the people I seem to talk about in regard to writing don’t necessarily do it and are always after the answers as to what makes it easy. I know there is no quick fix. There is no process or piece of infrastructure for this one, you’ve just got to do it in any way possible. So I resolve to looking back at the night we showed Pizzaman.
To see Pizzaman on the big screen is a wonderful experience more for the fact of being able to observe reaction from people. I think a lot of people thought I might be disappointed by either the turn out or the reactions I was getting but I managed to put it all into context. This is a bar/gig venue for bands with projected imagery rather than for short films. The type of people there were either people in Pizzaman or who have an invested interest in me or Teilo. People had not paid to see a movie and there were no seats. The age range was early 20s wanting to listen to the music being played. By the time the first episode had played most had lost interest. By the time the fourth episode was playing there was a handful of people left watching. The attention span in a bar is pretty low now, not that it wasn’t before, but when you consider that most people never finish a movie in a cinema without looking at their phone at least once the odds of holding attention in this space are slim to none.
With that said the highest point came during episode 4. Two guys I’d never met before were standing in the middle of the dance floor together transfixed to the screen laughing at Pizzaman. Its what I needed. An outside opinion to see if what I thought was funny and worked actually was funny and did work if you paid attention to the episode. I was lifted by the compliment. Then one of the bands came on and started quoting from Episode 4 as they were setting up, making people laugh more. Although this is not full justification for spending the last two years working on a singular project it instilled confidence in me. It gave me a resolve that I could do this for a living, all I need to do is monetise my skills.
Little tricks to grab attention was to put the volume up far louder than it should be, forcing people to either speak louder to each other or watch. As I suspected the impactual scenes were the attention grabbers; the scene with the girls screaming at each other, some of the darker topics when they were heard and the car chase. All the cleches worked. What didn’t work was the big screen. It was obvious that it wasn’t directed for a big screen audience and, at points, felt very amateurish, things that you may get away with if watching on a computer screen on your own.
I enjoyed the night on the whole and I was also filming all of the music acts as they performed, with Teilo’s camera. As the final band was going on it was time to show Pizzaman episodes 13 and 14. Throughout the episodes band members stood in front of the screen and even strummed guitars for tuning and sometimes strummed for no reason. I was livid. I also didn’t want to cause a scene but made the decision not to film them. I refuse to mention the name of the band here as they are all complete a**holes and don’t deserve any kind of publicity. What made my blood boil was the lack of respect for another artist’s work especially as I was the one that got them into the centre pages of the South Wales Echo that day. It really sickened me and destroyed the evening. I knew there was a lack of organisation but this was too much. It really signalled the end of Pizzaman for me and now whenever I am asked about the band in question I am sure to lie about the quality of their work, down right shoddy.
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