Sound and Silence

Last night I watched The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney, not Lloyd Webber), which unaccountably I had previously never seen. The Tyne Theatre was a character in this drama - sitting in the posh seats you can really enjoy the baroque, blue swags, plaster fruit and veg everywhere, the extreme wallpaper, the sickening height of the ceiling and the beautifully lettered names of composers adorning the balconies. Reminding you it was - is - also an Opera House. The film was a restored print with ghostly green or purple/blue tinges, and some of the scenes were almost undecipherable. In fact there was so much colour in the Black-and-White it took a while to register than in the masked ball sequence it had suddenly gone into colour...a garish, red-heavy technicolour. But it was excellent, atmospheric, and in the "famous" unmasking scene, truly scary. Meaningful looks, heaving bosoms and general (by modern talkie standards) overacting notwithstanding.

Excellent, very much because of the live score provided by Brendan Murphy and the Mediators, using piano, electric keyboards and synths, glass harmonica and random percussion. Normally, I hate electronic music, but the subtle shifts from piano to organ to disturbing electronics were perfect, and provided a great counterbalance to the melodramatic elements of the visuals. I started out expecting - hoping - this would be a percussion version of the Buster Keaton-esque rinkydink live piano, huge and fast and mirroring the film. Instead it was subtle, beautiful, minimal in places and crazy - but never baroque - in others. It balanced the film and helped to reinterpret it for a contemporary audience. And a live soundtrack, with all the emotion and sense of presence and spontaneity...as though the band were expressing their response to the film as it occurred to them (which of course wasn't how it worked)...
An inspired idea by whoever programmed it into the Whitley Bay Film Festival.
And it made me think why it is that I hate the comedy soundtracks of animations - the mwah-mwah noises , the plinkety plink of feet winding up to run, the strange violin wa-ee-a telling you someone's jaw has just dropped in amazement. You don't need them. It's overstating. It's bolted on. And formulaic - a code - the opposite of live, spontaneous and expressive. If animations - like silent films - need to make their statements boldly and clearly, then that can be counterbalanced by a soundtrack which tells the story in a more abstract and lyrical way. As an animator I work with just the images; although there may be a script if there is dialogue; but the story, the emotion, the atmosphere has to come across without any sound...or how can I complete it? The sound IS an add-on, and yet it has to be as communicative, as creative, as crafted as the animation (or the silent movie) itself. And somehow it has to give an impression of an integrated, holistic end product...of an interplay between the two elements even though one is created after and in response to the other...a collaboration. I wish I could produce my own scores for the animation. Mostly, I wish I could afford to commission Brendan to do it.

Performance to Camera...or Microphone

A good friend and sometime artistic collaborator has recently started working in "performance to camera" which is interestingly/ subtly not the same as acting or - well - performing. It is a way to share practice which is not simply a documentation, and engages the audience on an emotional level more than a documentary, perhaps because the artist has control of the process. Although maybe also a fruitful area for debate/ argument about auteurship and the locus of the "art" within the medium. I thought of this when I was doing the final sound mix for the soundtracks of the Shakespeares. I wrote the scripts, yes (based obviously on the ideas of Shakespeare, Hollinshed, and a number of scholars); but they were recorded as a kind of radio play, by members of "Out in the Garden" theatre group. It was live, and although the actors were not professionals they were very human and convincing . And it was apparent that there was a real interaction between the characters as well as the actors.

Mary Queen of Scots...it's an allegory

In very short animated shorts, the whole process tends to be a one-woman band. Ideas, Writing, Drawing, Animating... rather like the process of painting. This process did begin with a written story, but also with a strong sense of what the visuals would be and that the two would work together. Isn't that the only way? But working with a group of people in this way is refreshing. The group sessions had their own life, and that life came into the film, opened it out - letting mistakes or improvisations happen and then remodelling the film around the sound. Letting the particular way someone said a word, or phrased a thought feed back into the pace, and the detail of the images. Making sure that the things I had written actually made some kind of sense - or even some kind of poetry. So Im wondering about conceptualising this as a performance to microphone...which is then in conversation with the images, and they agree what they want to do and then get on with it.
The timings are different - the rhythms of natural speech are sometimes too fast/ sometimes too slow for the drawings...And the drawings have their own speed. Lumpier, more highly textured drawings wanting to move at a slower speed. Black and white drawings seemed to want a cleaner, crisper kind of sound - not technically crisp but stylistically. And then you have to try to match the kind of voice with not just the style of drawing but the shape of the character and how it moves. One of the voice cast asked me "How should a woodcut speak?"

Now that is a bloody good question all animators should be asking ourselves.