0:01:03 – Speaker 2
Greetings and salutations. Thank you for joining us. My name’s Jonathan Nadeau and this is Embrace your Storm. We’ve got another exciting episode for you. Today we’re speaking with Sean. He submitted a film to the Tornado Film Festival called Cover your Ears. So, Sean, thanks for coming on today.
0:01:22 – Speaker 3
Oh, my pleasure Thanks for having me.
0:01:25 – Speaker 2
It is great to have you on Before we get into Cover your Ears. How did you end up getting into film as your creative outlet, for what you use as your creativity?
0:01:43 – Speaker 3
Well, I had a class in high school that we kind of fooled around with video cameras. It was called TV Arts and I just really gravitated towards it and kind of did well in that class. That’s cool. Then when I was kind of out of high school and wondering what I was going to do, I moved out to Vancouver and went to film school and ended up dropping out of film school and taking my tuition refund and buying a camera and a bunch of books and kind of fell backwards into making my first film.
0:02:16 – Speaker 2
No kidding that is interesting. So, before we get into Cover your Ears, which is an interesting topic all on its own, what made you because here’s the thing, obviously, from what you just said, film is definitely like your creative outlet, where it’s like that’s the drive in you, right? Because you were like I’m going to go to school to learn how to do this thing, like you know what this isn’t really working, giving back my money and I’ll figure out how to teach myself because I’m not getting it the way I think I need it. That’s really interesting. That I went really that way about it. That’s really cool.
0:02:58 – Speaker 3
Yeah, exactly, I’m happy it worked out that way. I mean it could have went the other way I hear you, I hear you. Yeah, it seemed to. I ended up making my first film kind of very naive as to how difficult it would be, and by the time I was halfway through it I was like, well, I guess I’m finishing this, and it seemed to do well, and then that just springboarded into the next one.
0:03:21 – Speaker 2
So what was your first film about? Like? Did you write it? Did you like how much of you know? Did you kind of do everything? How much help did you have Like? What was it about Like? Kind of tell us a little bit about that.
0:03:33 – Speaker 3
It was also documentary. It was on the covering the life and career of a famous Canadian punk singer named Chai Pig from the band as In have you and I was just a big fan growing up. I was like excited to just kind of hang out with him. I thought it was cool and his story was incredibly interesting and he really led us into his life for over a year as we made it and yeah, it seemed to do really well.
0:04:05 – Speaker 2
I have to admit I’m a complete ignoramus. I feel like I know quite a bit about music. I’ve never heard that band ever.
0:04:16 – Speaker 3
Oh, in Canada they’re the royalty up here.
0:04:18 – Speaker 2
Yeah, I believe so. Like, what was like spot, what was his name? Again?
0:04:23 – Speaker 3
Mr Chai Pig was his stage name, but Ken Chin was his real name.
0:04:27 – Speaker 2
So what was like his? You know what made him. You know royalty, what was it like, made his band royalty?
0:04:35 – Speaker 3
Well, they were one of the first kind of wave of Canadian punk bands. 1981 was when they started.
0:04:42 – Speaker 2
Oh, okay, it’s from that time. Okay, I get it.
0:04:44 – Speaker 3
Yeah, so they really paved paved the way for a bunch of other artists. I get that and his story was really interesting. He struggled with mental health issues and addiction and he was kind of like borderline homeless when we started the documentary and through the course of the film he got the band back together and went on. You know, european South American tours and cross Canada kind of revived the band. So we we got lucky at coming in at the right time. That’s pretty cool, dude, yeah thank you.
It was a great project and especially being a big fan of the band, like in my teen years, it was just like cool to do.
0:05:23 – Speaker 2
I hear you so. So then what? What made you want to do? Cover your ears? Then, like, tell us what that’s about. What made you want to do it?
0:05:32 – Speaker 3
Well cover your ears is the documentary on the cause and effect of music censorship over the last hundred years. And being just a big music geek, I always kind of found those acts that are on the fringes really interesting and controversial acts. Even if I wasn’t kind of into the music, I was always interested in the story and we just my co-producer, kayvon Seremi, and I, who kind of developed the project, we just found that well, over a hundred years even, there’s just so many instances throughout and it always kind of reflected society and culture in a way that was not related to music and we just we just felt like that was a really interesting story and kind of started attacking it.
0:06:24 – Speaker 2
So what kind of what kind of like censorship did you find, like you know kind of before, like the like, say, the 20s and whatever the 1900s, like? What kind of censorship were you finding then?
0:06:37 – Speaker 3
Well, we, we start the documentary kind of at the birth of recorded music. So I mean, we have an early instance of Mozart who, surprisingly enough, wrote lyrics a lot about farting and shitting, which I was like shocked to find out. So, and there was all these kind of, like you know, pub tunes and little limericks and things that existed before recorded music. But we kind of dive in around jazz and the fear of jazz and blues.
0:07:11 – Speaker 2
Okay, okay, that’s interesting, that’s cool. I was actually just having a conversation the other day about I looked into like in the 1950s, kind of like, what were the top like ten, uh, the top like the top 100 songs? And then from the 50s and the majority of them were major bass songs. But now if you look at their minor bass songs the majority of the top 100 songs that’s like, yeah, that’s kind of interesting how that’s happened.
0:07:42 – Speaker 3
Yeah, the 50s were a really interesting time too, because it kind of it was the birth of rock and roll and it coincided with the birth of television, so it kind of melded together these two mediums in a new way that nobody had seen before.
0:07:57 – Speaker 2
Yeah, no, totally um. So what, so what? What else do you kind of go through, like how long is this? Uh is covering your ears, like how long is it and like what kind of other um you know sort of what are some of the major topics that you cover within it?
0:08:13 – Speaker 3
Well, it’s a feature length doc. It’s 103 minutes um we cover wow, we cover a lot uh we cover Frankzap at all. Yeah, we cover uh Zappa, the and Twisted Sister and the, uh PMRC Senate hearings and the AES. But I mean everything from the fear of jazz to kind of dirty blues, into birth of rock and roll, into the hippie movement, into the birth of punk and glam, hip hop, early hip hop, gangster rap, marilyn Manson, the Dixie Chicks. We try to cover it all yeah wow, man, that was so cool.
0:09:04 – Speaker 2
So, like have you done other documentaries? Have you done all sort of like? I don’t want to say like music based, but like you know, kind of like music leaning or focus, other work?
0:09:14 – Speaker 3
This is my only other music doc. I did a kind of live music web series for a bit but I did the film before this was called Fuck you All the Uwe Boll story about notorious German director Uwe Boll. I did one on silent film pioneer Max Ennett, so you know kind of always around the entertainment industry but I hear you Okay, hopefully on the fringes I tried to like kind of find those under the radar stories I hear you saying that’s cool, that’s really cool.
0:09:54 – Speaker 2
So are you working on anything currently? Do you have any plans after?
0:10:01 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I’ve got a couple of projects in development but I can’t really talk about them too much. But yeah, always working on the next one.
0:10:10 – Speaker 2
I hear you saying well, another question I like to ask you is what advice would you give to people listening in the audience at like first getting into the film industry, like you know? If they’re getting into writing or producing or directing, like, what kind of advice would you give them?
0:10:27 – Speaker 3
I would say just go for it and get out there and make mistakes and make bad film, because you’re never going to make a good film. So you make numerous bad films. Yeah, and don’t wait for any sort of grant or any permission to do it, just go do it.
0:10:45 – Speaker 2
I totally agree with you on that one for sure. And like especially with what you’re saying, like you just kind of kind of keep making things and like even if it’s bad or you know, but you think is bad or whatever it is, you kind of kind of keep working through those, because you have to get through those to get to the good stuff.
0:11:00 – Speaker 3
Yeah, and you might make a film that is cringe worthy to you but it might resonate with somebody else, absolutely. Absolutely. It might inspire somebody else to, even if they see it and go well, I could do that Then that’s good too, because it inspires other people’s hearts.
0:11:17 – Speaker 2
Absolutely, man. I agree with that 100%. So again, Sean, thank you so much for your time and your submissions to the Torian Film Festival and everyone. Thank you for listening, Thank you for downloading and don’t forget to embrace your storm. See ya.
0:11:31 – Speaker 1
Tornado with Jonathan Nadeau. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe now. See you first to hear new episodes with more stories of inspiration about the highs and lows of life and how embracing the storm is so much more fulfilling of a life than being crushed by the weight of the world. And until then, we hope you’re inspired to do something, whether it’s creating, participating or learning, whatever leads you to your personal passion.
Transcribed by https://podium.page
