Here's an interesting discovery I made.
This is Alexei Sayle, circa 1982.
The sequence was filmed in two separate locations, so there's a subtle break in continuity, but that's not unusual in any kind of filming. In this case, the two locations are barely a mile apart from each other.
The field is still there, but they filmed it away from the roadside, so the Street View camera doesn't get the same angle. But after much searching (see next shot) I know this is the exact field, and the stone wall in the foreground of the video is that seen at upper left in the lower streetview pic. It is now overgrown with bracken.
You can see on this map the wall that leads away from the road, from the north to the south, towards the path. This matches the continuity of the video, where the characters walk through the field, to the corner of the wall, and then run down to the path.
I struggled to find this location, as the road is not a main one, and could have been private, where Street View rarely goes. I searched for the distinctive building on the hilltop. After matching up fields, pylons, buildings, and road divisions, I found the exact spot. And as you can see, it has barely changed at all.
Then the sequence leaps to the village, and continuity is tight here. They start by skipping down the lane, west to east, past a house, up to a gate at the junction where the villagers cross a bridge, and straight into a farmyard.
This lane was a challenge, as there are three that radiate out from the village, and more beyond, so I had to look at each of them before determining which one it was. You can see the house behind them is the same, and the power pole to the left of shot also matches (a new pole, but in the same spot), with the shed behind the girl.
The girl then dances effusively in front of a couple of houses, which are distinctively recognisable by the fence palings and a red letterbox at the gate. Both remain unchanged.
The gate is just off the centre of the village, at the junction of three roads, a lot closer than the video implies. Though there are some considerable differences, and a mismatch due to the lenses used, you can recognise the same power poles in the field behind the gate.
The wide shot of the village bridge is deceptive. It's filmed in the middle of the field quite a distance behind the gate, and not as a POV from the gate. I couldn't find a matching angle in Street View, but you can see that there are vines on the main building just right of centre in the video shot, and also left of centre in the Street View angle, which are barely unchanged after 25 years. What's up with that?
And finally a few metres down the road is a farm, with a large open courtyard, where they set up the fairground for the big dance finale. You can recognise the tractor shed and the long building as the most obvious matching features, though there are some minor alterations like new roof tiles and different paint jobs.
I don't know much about music. I don't even listen to it as often as most other people do. I prefer working and relaxing in silence.
But I do have a small music collection, which I unearth and play every once in a while, and a lot of it tends to be movie soundtracks. I used to buy quite a lot of it, but recently it's died down somewhat, as not a lot of movie music takes my fancy as being particularly pleasant to hear outside of the context of the visuals.
Movie soundtracks (or "scores" as they are often called, to differentiate them from the myriad of pop song collections that have marred the soundtrack racks in recent times) used to spirit you away back into the story of the film, or allow you to visualise something even more exciting of your own making. But these days the editing of a good action movie can be so erratic that the score has to match that effect, making for something quite unpleasant and jarring.
Rob and I have been churning through the final digital visual effects shots for Checkpoint, and we are almost nearing the end of it all. After the main CG work is done, there are a few composites of bullet hits and similar, followed by the colour grade, and the title and credits captions. We can handle all those ourselves, but there is one side we don't have the talents for, and that's the audio: sound effects and music.
The sound effects will be started soon, as the edit is only a couple of effects shots short of the final cut, so that just leaves the music.
In the past, our team has not had a local composer. There is a guy that Dags uses for his films, but though he has visited Australia frequently, he actually lives in the US someplace, which is not the ideal way to get a soundtrack fine tuned. Dags seems happy using this method, but for us it would not have worked very well, we felt we needed to be able to sit down and go through each part of the film piece by piece.
Unbeknownst to us, one of our general dogsbody and anonymous background extras we use frequently, Andy Scott, has a talent that had been hidden from us. He's a pianist. Coupled with his interest in movies, and his willingness to always be a part of the team in whatever capacity that's going, he was an ideal choice. If we could organise a keyboard and a suitable piece of software, we thought we could probably get something that would sound pretty decent out of him, if we sat with him all the way through it.
There are lots of different kinds of music creation software, both simple and elaborate. One that has been around for a long time, and has become quite sophisticated, is Cubase, which allows for MIDI keyboard input to be translated into full realistic orchestral sound samples. A friend of Rob's, Troy, had a copy of this software and a little bit of experience in using it (though not as MIDI, instead for offline track mixing). We corralled him in, and this week we all sat down together to nut out our soundtrack.
At first we struggled, as you might expect for newcomers to this branch of movie making. Partly it was due to learning the software, which had a couple of fundamental bugs we had to work around. But also it was because Andy's piano experience doesn't exactly mirror what is required to get a correctly arranged orchestra. Luckily Troy is a talented violinist, and is familiar enough with orchestras he could provide his own input into what was required.
After searching online and fixing the bugs in the software, and learning the basics of how the software operated, I took over from Troy on the days he wasn't available, and after four days of work, we managed to create six or seven pieces of music, including a few incidental moments, for throughout the film, and though we were muddling along in an unfamiliar environment, I think we came up trumps. There's a consistent style to the music, and it has some evocative melodies. We are justifiably proud of what we've achieved so far.
Troy will now take the MIDI tracks away and mix them into a full sounding orchestra, and hopefully it won't be too long before we'll have our completed soundtrack.
It has been very interesting to have to deal with this part of our movie. Though Rob seemed a little bit daunted by our lack of experience, I was nevertheless quite excited. Rob provided suggestions of what he wanted, I was able to relate it in terms that Andy could (almost) understand, while Troy filled in the terminology blanks, and together we made a great team.
I hope that one day soon we can do this again. Perhaps, dare I say it, even for a feature length film.
I don't often pay much attention to song lyrics. If they're even intelligible. I assume they are a competently written poetry, telling some lame story or expressing some simple emotion, that matches the feel of the music.
Every so often, though, someone comes along who writes amazing lyrics that really stand out. The first person I remember recognising their skill at this was, perhaps surprisingly, George Michael. For some reason, I could sing many of his solo and Wham songs and through doing so recognise his talent as a lyricist.
However, the opposite can also happen - seriously bad lyrics to what is an otherwise decent song. And the first time I encountered that and it really got me upset was listening to Mike and the Mechanics, with their song "The Living Years" (and then retroactively seeing that their previous hit, "Silent Running", was equally awful).
Not that long ago, when I had very little money, an awful lot of really cool geeky stuff was made available. They were difficult to source (I occasionally heard about them through my local comic shop), expensive to ship (sometimes shipping cost more than the item itself), and for those reasons, and my lack of cash, I had to let most of them pass me by.
But now I have some money, and the difference is glorious. It's so easy to find the coolest things online. Toys, books, DVDs, music - if you want it, you can get it. Due to demand, shipping is now really competitive and affordable. It's a doddle to get coolness personified sent to me in exciting brown cardboard boxes.
Last week I got a new comic art anthology. Today I got three new DVDs. Next week I expect to get a soundtrack CD and a DVD of one of my favourite movies.
I'm not a fan of the more commonly experienced forms of shopping, i.e. clothes and shoes and wandering from shop to shop, trying stuff on, looking for bargains. Blah. Buying online is so much easier, and more exciting. Perhaps I buy rather too much too often, but I'm careful; It hasn't depleted my savings too much. And it means I get more parcels!
I love getting parcels in the mail.
The Internet is an amazing thing. If you need to find out something, no matter how obscure, chances are that someone else will have already wanted to know too, and left an enquiry somewhere online, which you can use vicariously to get the same answer.
I have been hearing a song on TV, and wondered whose song it was. All I knew is it began with an “Eeoo” sound repeated. So I looked up “Eeoo Song” but had no luck. I then tried “Weeoo Song” and huzzah – through another person asking a similar question, but interestingly in reference to a completely different song to mine, someone suggested the very one I was actually looking for. Though they don't actually say "Weeoo" in the song after all.
Gwen Stefani, The Sweet Escape.
Wow, what a wonderful movie! That's what all the reviews said I'd be feeling after seeing it, and were they ever right! It's a beautiful take on fairy tale films, and the Disney-ified approach in particular. Kind of poking fun at them, while also contributing to and honouring them.
Very funny, incredibly heartwarming performances, as romantic comedies go this has to be in my top five. Amy Adams as Giselle and James Marsden as the over-the-top Prince Edward were particularly impressive. Playing an animated character in live action is not something that is often done, especially in this style, and they managed groundbreaking performances that really shone. Top marks to them!
And the animation at the beginning was also fantastic. I liked the colour choices they used, especially in the lines. I've not seen them apply that technique so successfully before, and I hope to see more like it in future animated films, such as the upcoming Princess and the Frog.
There were hundreds of sly references and homages to actual Disney animated films, and a list of them can be found here. It was truly a dazzling display of film making, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everybody!
