One of Our Own in the Media!

[OC Richard]

Wow thanks guys! I didn't see this thread until just now. I've been running around with the pipe band all weekend.

It's kinda funny how the whole thing came about: one of the artists I work with at Disneyland is the daughter of a photographer for the Orange County Register.

I was telling people at work about the Battleship gig, and she told her dad, who thought it might make for a little local interest type of article to coincide with the release of the movie.

Well Mr Dad showed up and took a bunch of photos, but he brought a reporter with him, which I wasn't expecting. She asked a zillion questions and made a lot of notes while Mr Dad snapped away. It was a surrealistic thing.

Then a couple days later a videographer shows up at the door! Says they want some video of me playing something, to have for their online version of the article. My wife is saying "what is all this about? Who ARE all these people?"

Well in the end it's a pretty good article. A couple misleading things crept in, not surprising when you think that it's a reporter who knows nothing about the piping world taking a bunch of notes and having to hammer out an article in short notice.

One thing I should clarify is that there's no more money coming for Battleship. For feature films it's been my experience that you just get paid the once.

The talk about residuals came from my experience with TV shows and especially TV commercials. For "spots", when done as an AFM member, you get paid one (quite low) fee for the actual recording date, and if the spot doesn't run that's all you get. I've done plenty of stuff like that.

But if it airs you get paid again, quite a bit more, a lower amount if it runs regionally and a higher amount if it runs nationally. This payment only covers a limited period of time (I don't remember what the period is) and if the spot is still running past that period you get paid again. Somebody can make a pile of money if a spot keeps running... think of the "Mikey likes it" spot that was airing for decades.

The best spot for me was the Slazenger Golf ad which ran for a year or so. The ad was gorgeous, shot on a fantastic ancient golf course on the cliffs overlooking the sea in Ireland. The golf course happens to have an old cemetery right next to it with amazing stone Celtic Crosses in it. It's all real, no "Hollywood". The music was lovely too, a nice theme for me to play on the uilleann pipes backed up by the LA Philharmonic! Anyhow that spot kept running and checks kept coming.

Some of the coolest stuff never aired. I played, of all things, the theme song from the 1960s Hawaii Five-0 show on the uilleann pipes for a Toyota Truck spot. I have a copy of that, it's so cool. But the public will never hear it! And very little $ came from that, just the recording date.

TV shows are different, you just get an annual residual check if the thing is still running in syndication. I still get checks (very low now) from Cagney & Lacey, Murder She Wrote, and Star Trek The Next Generation.

In the heady days after Titanic came out the Braveheart/Titanic piper, Eric Rigler, was referring so much work to me that I more or less took a couple years off my Disneyland job and was doing TV, feature films, albums, video game soundtracks, theme park soundtracks, and whatnot full time.

That's almost completey dried up and I do very little of that any more. A few years ago I resigned from the AFM due to not having enough work to justify staying in the Union.

One interesting thing about that article is that it was picked up by our tiny local paper, The Tustin News. And I got an email from a journalist in Scotland asking some questions! He had seen the OC Register article online. It's kinda amazing that a Scottish journalist would read the OC Register.

Well thanks again you all!

PS I just now watched the video of me playing Danny Boy on the uilleann pipes. I would have preferred playing a traditional sean nos air or summat but the videographer wanted "the most well-known signature song" and for the Irish pipes Danny Boy would have to be it! I can't get those uilleann pipes out of the case without being asked to play that tune. In any case there are great closeups of my Edwardian sporran!