Open Lyric project for a fantasy/medieval musical

[MI_Buddy]

Hello all,

I've been a fan of OCR for about a year since I first discovered it from a TED video, I'm getting most of my fix from Rainwave. The quality of the work here is awesome. I've always wanted to collaborate with you guys, and while what I've got going isn't typical, I'd love to hear if some of you are interested in being a part .(if it's not appropriate for this forum, I apologize and please let me know )

I want to say this up-front: this is not paid up-front work. There's opportunity for profits over time. That said, it's a very lax and fun project. If you join, there's not even pressure for due dates because of the way it's set up.

The project is a musical called The Legend of Sir Cumference. It's a medieval comedy that follows how Cumference (Cam) became Sir Cumference of the Round Table. It involves a beardless dwarven princess, trolls, grapefruit, and a Xanatos gambit.

Composers/musicians of any skill level can compose any style or genre of music for The Legend of Sir Cumference's lyrics (feel free to do jazz, dubstep, orchestral, pop, ragtime... whatever).

Specifics of the musical's story and the setup below:

Musical Story (in-depth)

The shepherd Cumference's (Cam) sheep are stolen by the dwarves on his Birthday. When he goes to save them his magician sister Maggie and sheep Patches tag along.

They end up at a royal dwarven birthday feast for the dwarven princess, Shilo. It's her 17th Birthday, when dwarven princes send dwarven princesses Birthday gifts as marriage proposals. Because she is beardless (and that's atrocious in dwarven culture) she only receives 1 gift, a baby dragon, which is bad luck. The gift-sender is named Zardir. She names the baby dragon Fido.

Cam, Maggie, and Patches are discovered and thrown into prison. Maggie tries to escape using magic but the cell besides theirs is unlocked instead, and the criminals Fuhlip and Fuhlop escape. Maggie, try as she might, can't unlock their cell. Shilo ends up helping them escape, but Fuhlip and Fuhlop kidnap her.

When Cam and Maggie return to the village, the dwarves attack accusing Cam of kidnapping her.

Cam, Maggie, and Patches flee from the battle, their return to the village blocked by the dwarves and the dwarves in pursuit. But they end up being captured by the trolls, who have Shilo in their dungeon.

After they're all rescued by the ninja moves of Cam's Mom, Gramma, and sheep Patches, the trolls attack the humans and dwarves by the village, hoping to cut them all down.

The Alpha Troll kidnaps Shilo and flees to the mountains, Cam, Maggie, Patches and the dwarven king trailing behind. When they reach the mountain, the Alpha Troll reveals that he is Zardir and Shilo is doomed to marry him by dwarven tradition. He just wants to destroy Modin's kingdom and Shilo forever because he failed to completely do it years ago.

Fido shows up and Zardir is terrified. He escapes into the mountains with Shilo. The heroes follow, but Zardir knocks out a bridge and they fall down into cold water.

Maggie gets encouragement from the dwarven Lord Modin and is able to create a bubble for them to escape through the underground river. They end up in the room where Shilo and Zardir are.

Unfortunately, Mama Dragon has finally found baby Fido and threatens to destroy them all as she tears the mountain apart. Everyone but Cam, Fido, and Zardir escape. Cam sings a lullaby he's used on the sheep and Fido to calm Mama Dragon, and is able to ride it into battle to defeat the trolls.

King Arthur and his knights arrive at the battle scene once the trolls have fled. King Arthur knights Cam a dragon tamer for The Round Table. Because Cam's now nobility, Lord Modin can marry his daughter Shilo to Cam instead of Zardir, as they pretend that the stolen sheep were a "gift" from Cam.

And that pretty much wraps it up! It's more complex than that internally, but I think that covers what you may want to know.

Open Lyrics

I'm trying to pioneer a new way of indie collab that I'm calling Open Lyrics. It's a way to get a wide variety of music for a project as well as provide opportunities for musicians of any skill level.

I've put the musical on Amazon and the lyrics online (which you can find here). Anybody can create music for any of the songs. They can make it any genre or style they want, and multiple versions of the same song can exist. Theaters then purchase the song versions that they want to use in their performance.

Composers make 80% of all profits from their song version(s) and they handle the majority of the rights, as well as distribution (they can use whatever services they want, set whatever prices they want, etc). Theaters purchase the songs for their actors and purchase sheet music (if available).

When I say composers make 80% profits, they get the money first and then send 20% to me. This is for song sales, ad money (like if they put it on YouTube), etc.

I'd list your song on the website in SoundCloud playlists. Theaters using your song version would be required to put your artist name beside the song in the bulletin, giving your audience exposure to your name as well as your music.

In exchange for you making the majority of direct profits, I can give performing rights to theaters without charge. I only get the rights to allow theatrical productions of your song in the context of the full musical. All other rights are handled by you.

I checked the profits we'd both be making, and we'd both be making more than we would be in normal publishing means and you could be making double the % you normally would. This method for TLOSC also keeps PayPal (or another money transferring system) from getting a large chunk of the profits; if one composer's song is used in a performance and they got royalties, they wouldn't make much and PayPal would make it even less (unless money was pooled until transfers were worth it, which could end up being a massive headache). Since musicians are pricing their own songs, I also don't have to worry about whether or not one musician's song should get more of the royalty than another.

If you have any questions about all this shtuff, please ask! I've got more info on this webpage if you're interested, but that's the core of it right there.

How to join

The first step is to email me with what your vision is for your song version, a demo of your song version (a link to SoundCloud is great), and a link to your portfolio. Feel free to tell me a little about yourself too! You can see my email on the site. I'll add you to a FB group for composers for TLOSC.

Once we've got a final song version, we sign a contract, you upload your song and make it available for purchase, and it will be available for distribution on my site soon.

I don't have a sample contract ready to show yet, but I'll see about getting it out there sooner than later. I don't want it to be some big secretive thing, I want to get your input on it and see if you guys have any concerns!

For more details, I feel like I gotta send you to this page. It's a buttload of information as it is.

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I'd love to hear your thoughts and if anybody's interested!