Time Travel Self Evaluation

I would say there were points I planned out prior to my presentation that I would have liked to stick closer to or execute more confidently, particularly with regards to the bit where I almost said Benjamin Franklin "invented" electricity. I also fidgeted and rocked nervously throughout the process, which is a habit of mine I can hopefully iron out via practice before I present the Capstone.

Capstone: Music and Story

          When writing a plot, there are two things you need to strive for. Well not really, but for the purposes of this project, let's stick with two right now. The first is a plot that is coherent; the second is a plot that is emotionally investing. The latter is where it can be easier for a creator to make his work into a film or play. In a story, musical cues can greatly amplify (or detract from) the way your audiences are immersed in your work. There's a lot of skill involved in doing it right, and those who have that skill become legends in the industry. Their reputations (and their discographies) speak for themselves; Zimmer, Williams, Hitchcock and Herrmann, etc. But before we can talk about the work they did, we have to go back in time. Really, really far back in time.

          The Greeks believed that music brought you closer to the Gods. Especially reverent an instrument back then was the lyre. Invented by the god Apollo, the lyre is a small harp-like string instrument fashioned from a turtle's shell. Traveling poets would carry their lyres, and little else, and play while they recited their poetry. One such poet was Homer, the ancient poet who was, of course, responsible for the Iliad and Odyssey. The lyre became one of the first in a long line of folk instruments, instruments that have significance in the culture of their inventor. The Indigenous Americans have animal-skin drums. The Indians use traditional string instruments like the sitar. Australian Aborigines play the didgeridoo.

          The music of Homer's lyre added a layer to the immersion of his stories. We see this behavior today in TV shows. The next time you watch a nighttime drama, or perhaps your daytime soaps, listen for the background music. You probably don't notice it half the time you're watching, but still it plays.

          Shakespeare said, "If music be the food of love, play on." By his time, storytelling had long graduated from wandering Greek poets to semi-permanent Greek amphitheaters. The musical play had not yet been invented yet, but music still played (no pun intended) a meaningful role. Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle had a Choral interlude after every scene, in which the chorus would sing a three-part ode. As they crossed the stage, they would recite a strophe, followed by an antistrophe as they crossed back. Then they would finish in an epode in a different meter than the two strophies.

          

          Music never left the stage either. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "It was customary n Tudor and Stuart Drama to include at least one song in every play." While left out of most textual reprints, Shakespeare's Macbeth contained songs during the witches' scenes, though no actual notation of the scoring remains. Somewhat superstitious, the citizens of Olde-Timey England gravitated to sounds that were clean and easy to listen to. Lutes were considered to be good, soulful instruments to hear in the Elizabethan age. Oboes, on the other hand, played "ill winds that blew no good," and were used for dark or unsettling scenes.

          Today we have many instruments at our disposal, and the way they resonate with us emotionally in part comes down from the traditions of Shakespeare's time. Oboes, along with other low wind instruments like the bassoon and the clarinet's lower register still evoke somber, unsettling thoughts. Though contextually no more or less scary than the rest of the ballet about moving dolls and child-abducting rats, the "Arabian Dance" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker is one of the more creepy character dances. On the other hand, the piccolo in "Chinese Dance" gives it a decidedly more uplifting feel. Have a listen:

          The tempo and key of the song helps to add that certain je ne sais quoi. I'll spare you the music theory lesson, but "Arabian Dance" is in a minor key, while "Chinese Dance" is in a major key. Minor keys are known to be more sad-sounding than major ones. Additionally, the Arabian Dance has a markedly slower pace.

          In the 1980's, directors of "action movies" have dipped into the classical pool of music for their trailers, namely the 1936 Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. Chances are you've never heard it performed as an actual cantata, but in the trailer for a big budget movie. Feel free to stop the clip after you get the idea.

          It's worth mentioning that that's Mozart, not Orff, pictured in the thumbnail. 

          

          Other than the fact that it's public domain and therefore highly cost-effective, there are a few reasons why "O' Fortuna" shows up so often to pump up its audience. It doesn't impact the story per se, but it does get people invested in hearing the story. At some point after the Romans died away, someone decided that Latin is a really dramatic, ominous language when belted out by a choir. The unfamiliar, ancient chanting has, after iteration after iteration in film, developed the ability to immediately pump the adrenaline and seemingly raise the stakes of the onscreen footage. And when the bombast of Burana is too much, baritones and trombones can up the adventurousness too. Stay tuned for that.

          Winds and brass have very distinct sounds and varying skill sets. But for the widest range of emotion, the king of the heap is the violin. Alone they can express moving sorrow, or rousing festivity. In groups, they can carry any number of styles. One duo put violins to quite good use...

  

          It's not often that a director is as in tune with the music of his film as its composer, but Alfred Hitchcock certainly fills that role. His relationship with composer Bernard Herrmann was one of the strongest in Hollywood, and together they built an empire founded on the basic human feeling of suspense. Hitchcock movies like North by North-West and Vertigo popularized the whirring strings that you hear so often today in shows like Lost.

          It just grates on you, doesn't it? The sawing back in forth of the strings just makes you want something to happen that will make it stop. Herrmann and Hitchcock also started the trend of "scare chords" when they made a little movie called Psycho.

          The harsh, piercing shrieks of the violins illustrate a picture Hitchcock couldn't show in his era of filming, speaking volumes for the violence unfolding just off-camera. The sound has yeilded countless followers and parodies over the generations. Especially for creating "jump-scares." Actually, half the reason jump-scares work is because of the scare chord. If the sudden visual doesn't alarm you, the loud noise probably will.

          

          Hitchcock also knew how to when to use silence to his advantage. There's a scene from The Birds in which a woman finds a man murdered (by the birds naturally) free of all music, leaving us nothing to focus on but her strained gasps as she tries to find the air to scream.

          In today's Hollywood, no composer is more prolific than John Williams (Superman, the Star Wars trilogies, most of Steven Spielberg's repertoire, the first three Harry Potters, etc.) Williams has a knack for giving characters their own tunes to blend into the background music. Chances are you've heard the Imperial March from the first Star Wars trilogy, the theme music for Darth Vader, the film's helmeted antagonist. Fast forward now to the prequel trilogy, telling Vader's story from humble beginnings as the boy Anakin Sywalker, and you'll get a taste for Williams's skill as a composer. This is "Anakin's Theme."

          Listen at the end of each phrase, and you'll hear the sweeping score transition into the tail end of the Imperial March. For reference I'd let you hear the real deal, but that would be against copyright law - and that would be terrible. Regardless, the result is an interesting Easter-egg that carries meaningful plot-significance.

          The emotional output of a piece depends greatly on its instrumentation and tempo. The Harry Potter series has used "Hedwig's Theme" as a theme song since its innaugural outing in 2001. The Sorceror's Stone introduced the theme with a mysterious and whimsical air, befitting of the child-friendly atmosphere the film possessed.

          The sixth film, The Half-Blood Prince, is an escalation point in the conflict with Voldemort. The theme is still recognizable, but the tempo is slightly faster, and there's a heavy focus on baritone horns. The result is a more urgent and adventurous score.

          The eighth and last film, the second part of The Deathly Hallows, takes pains to demonstrate the finality of the series. Hedwig's theme reverts back to its music-box-like sound, only tiny, distant, broken.

          Music can do, as Hans Zimmer (Inception, The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean)  puts it, "unseen things" to the stories of movies and plays. It can immerse the audience further when done right, but when done wrong it can really take you out of the experience. One British studio actually had to lower the background music of its Planet Earth-like science documentary Wonders of the Universe after too many complaints that viewers couldn't hear the host over the background music.

          The other pitfall is that old adage "you can't please 'em all." Sometimes the music in a work, or the actor portraying a role, makes the viewer turn up their nose to the point that they can't focus on the story your telling. The author of the report on Wonders of the Universe, for example, can't stand the upright base in the score to Seinfeld.
          Music's influence on story doesn't have anything to do with the way we actually understand the story; rather, it affects the emotional connection we make to the story. If we cry, it makes us sob, if we chuckle, it makes us roar with laughter. Whether or not music is the food of love, audiences eat it up, and that's not about to change anytime soon.

Citations: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.1&thid=13df5771f814e91d&mt=application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document&url=https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/?ui%3D2%26ik%3D6481424de1%26view%3Datt%26th%3D13df5771f814e91d%26attid%3D0.1%26disp%3Dsafe%26realattid%3Df_hfcwl73n0%26zw&sig=AHIEtbT-BFKDxyC3Lu_pbDEmtUu6jA4haA

Oscars Wild

Named for the first six-inch tall gold person to act in Hollywood, the Oscars are the most prestigious event of the year recognizing outstanding films and film-makers. But what makes a movie worthy of the Academy's attention?

For one thing, it isn't the box-office. While usually a decent way to get a nomination, huge revenue does not an Oscar get. 2012's biggest movie, the Avengers, only netted a single nomination (for Visual Effects). Popularity isn't a guarantee either; I'd even say it's a stymie. Some of the big titles press-wise, Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey received 1, 0, and 3, respective nominations.

The Academy of Motion Pictures seems to favor what we might call "artsy-fartsy" films. Last year's The Artist and 2010's The King's Speech were far from the most popular movie of their respective years. The idea is to look for great, well-made films, not blockbuster ones. Thus the cinematography (and acting, art direction, etc.) won the not at all sophisticated Return of the King Best Picture and 10 other Oscars in 2003.

I was surprised that, after The Dark Knight's Best Picture snub-fiasco in 2009, Rises received no love, even pity-love, from the Academy. Personally, I'm pulling for Lincoln to sweep the upper tier of awards (Daniel Day-Lewis is at least a shoe-in for Lead Actor). However, artsier films like Les Miserables and Life of Pi are serious contenders to spoil Spielberg's night.

Two Degrees of Adam Sandler

Mr. Carty considered Will Ferrel's role in Stranger Than Fiction as the "straight man". This blog post has nothing to do with Will Ferrel.

The straight man is, by association, the most normal character in his inner circle, if not the plot entirely. Think about the people Harold works with. Think about Dave. Think about Harold's reaction to Dave and his surroundings. That's kind of the way I prefer Ferrel and his ilk. To compare and contrast, I reccomend you watch Jack and Jill.

While not the pinnacle of Sandler's resume, this movie is an excellent case study in two types of comedy. Jill represents everything I hate about Sandler comedy; she's childish, obnoxious, and about as subtle as a neon-green elephant with cymbals on its feet. Jack is everything I enjoy about Sandler comedy; he's just kinda walking down the street, sees a hobo with a banana, and he's just like, "Huh. That sure is a hobo." Then he moves onto the next scene. He's so good at straight-man comedy that you wonder why he spends so much screen-time flapping his arms and making inane faces at the camera. 

Grammar? What am you talking about?

     Earlier this week we got a handout about the liberties an author is allowed to take with grammar to make their works better. This is largely because normal people don't talk using the grammatical conventions we learn in school. This is especially true for people who write in colloquialisms form way back when, or who use modern informal speech. Further room for experimentation comes into play when a writer experiments with funny accents.
     And then there's sentence fragments, a major grammatical faux-pas. For example, when you are asked, "Why aren't you eating?", grammar dictates that the proper response is "I am not eating because I am not hungry."

HOWEVER!

     Who actually says things like that? Most people would say something like, "Eh, not really hungry." or, like me, "No reason." That's like sacrilege or something. And while we're on that, like, subject; there's stuttering and catching. This isn't particularly common in the written word unless they have a lithp or other s-s-s-speech impediment. In normal speech, people aren't practiced orators, so they can repeat themselves or other... stuff.

Point of View in Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment is most obviously told from the 3rd Person Limited. We follow the sociopathic protagonist Raskolnikov around London, and stay firmly rooted in his life, right. Wrong! The esteemed Mr. Dostoevsky actually creates an ingenious hybrid of Third Person views. We actually follow Raskolnikov around in a sort of narrative bubble of Omniscience. So while we focus on Rodyon for the majority, we can follow the people that he just interacted with for a block or so. We can also peer into the minds of the other characters, though this is used very sparingly by the author. We see the latter technique when Rodya meets Marmeladov in the bar. Dostoevsky gives us some juxtaposition between Ol' Marm's outgoing personality and inner turmoil. The former we see when Pulcheria and Dunya leave Rodyon's house. Rodya would have no means of hearing this conversation, but we do, and will likely need to remember it for later.

Out West

This is the blog post for the week of January 28. The blog post for last week precedes this one, and is dated thus.

This weekend, as I pondered through a second viewing of Industrial Light and Magic's Rango, I realized just how much this outwardly so-so picture manages to lovingly homage its western roots.

A Western takes place between the end of the Civil War and the 1890's, when the frontier closed. Westerns actually originated in literature well before the War, when the "frontier" was east of the Missouri River. One of the earliest films in the genre (or of any genre for that matter), was The Great Train Robbery of 1903. Train Robberies are a staple of the Western Genre (and one of the only elements Rango doesn't homage or parody). During the 50's and 60's Western TV Shows and Comics exploded, and from Bonanza to Gunsmoke to Jonah Hex they still remain in semi-public conscience. It was a time of bank robbers and wanted posters, cattle drives and posses. Gunslingers faced off at high noon, and unsavory characters walked bow-legged into saloons.

But when you think of a Western (even though few do anymore) you probably think of the genre's little amigo, the Spaghetti Western. Called so because of their Italian studio origin, Spaghetti Westerns were often filmed on location in Spain (Where the cacti were more stereotypical). They were often distillations and deconstructions (breakdowns) of regular Westerns, but managed to outshine their inspirations. Sergio Leone directed the Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), source of some of Wild West cinema's most seminal scenes (like that song that always plays when a gunfight happens), and helped make Clint Eastwood (The Man With No Name) the household name he is today.