"Oh, Pepino!" has a music video!

I wrote a pop punk anthem and music video for a children's book about my dog.

Unemployment sure takes you strange places… Here's the story:

The Dog with No Chill

Before it was a book, "Oh, Pepino!" was a song. Albeit, a short one. My wife and I sing around the house. A lot. We narrate our lives through atonal melodies with made up lyrics.

It doesn't matter what the subject is:

Doing dishes? "You gotta scrub, scrub, scrub that stuck-on mac and cheese!"
Stub your toe on the coffee table? "Oh, oh , oh, oh, oh! This table broke my toooee, girl!"

We're insufferable.

And we have many songs for Pepino. One day, Pepino had a particularly intense case of the zoomies. He was just running back and forth between the living room and dining room. Over and over and over again. I just blurted out "Oh, Pepino! The dog with no chill!". Initially, it was sung in the style of "Desperado" by the Eagles if you can imagine that…

Weeks later, I remembered that line and ultimately wrote the draft manuscript for the book in one sitting. I didn't know I was going to write a book back then, but I saved it in my iPhone Notes app just the same.

Now What?

I've already gone into the circumstances around writing "Oh, Pepino!" in my last post, so you can read more about it there. Long story short, after losing my job, I needed a distraction, and a few months later, a book popped out. I didn't really know what to do with it. I tried shopping it around to literary agents with little success. In the interest of just getting my work out into the universe, I decided to self-publish. I'm glad I had that experience because it taught me a lot about formatting, copyright, and distribution (though, I'll likely try the traditional publishing route again for future books).

The most daunting part for me was (and still is) marketing. I just didn't have a clue of how to promote my work so people could find it. I set up an Instagram, thought about launching an ad campaign, thought better of it because that costs money and I had no job, aimlessly made some posts about Pepino. Then it hit me… I should record a song!

This goes a little hard for a kids song, doesn't it?

One of my many hobbies is writing and recording music. I'm not a professional by any means, but I've done it off and on since I was in my teens. I have a mountain of half-finished songs sitting on my hard drive, collecting digital dust. I'm horrible about carrying them over the finish line. Usually, I give up when I get to the vocals. I'm not a great singer, and I really struggle to write lyrics I'm happy with.

"Oh, Pepino!" was different, though. I already had the lyrics since the book is basically a song. Sure, I had to rework a few things and find something to use for the chorus, but the hard work was already done.

As for the instrumentation and vocal melody, I wanted to make something fun, memorable, and consistent with the tone of the book. I spent about a week writing, recording and mixing it and when I played it for my wife, she shook her head. "Pop Punk? This goes a little hard for a kids song, doesn't it?". I guess she's right, but I kinda like that about it; it's unexpected. I mean… at the end of the day, it's still just a cute song about a dog peeing on the carpet, but I like that it has some teeth.

Adventures in CPU melting

Now that the song was done, it was time to make a music video. I have next to no experience with video editing, so this proved to be a challenge. I jumped into DaVinci Resolve and started trying to cobble something together. I animated some of the video using Fusion, but it was a huge strain on my old MacBook Pro. Eventually, the program started crashing and causing crazy visual glitches. My MacBook's fans were running full-blast and I knew I was probably cooking the CPU. I had to figure out a different approach.

I ended up animating the rest of the video in Figma. Figma is an application primarily used by UX/UI Designers for designing software interfaces. I used it every day for my job and know it inside and out. That said, it wasn't designed to do animations like this. Still, I managed to put something together that I was happy with. I had a lot of fun making this and learned a lot in the process. Perhaps, I'm promising too much, but I'd like to do something like this for every future book I publish… we'll see…

Here it is! The music video for "Oh, Pepino!". Enjoy!