So here's a blog series I have in mind. Every day, on my commute to and from work, I listen to music on my iPod, and I feel that I get really inspired... to write. The problem is that I almost never have a pen and paper ready for such situations. So I just let my imagination go and get caught in the moving pictures flitting through my mind, but don't have anything to show for it. Well, we're putting an end to that!
My first musically inspired moving picture is based on The Blue Notebooks, by Max Richter, a gorgeous collection of contemporary classical pieces. Here's my first dilemma. Do I delineate a story plot to the flow of the indivdual songs, or do the images attempt to evoke themes from the emotional response to the collective work? True to my nature, I aim to compromise...
This story is and has to be set in Prague, as a few of the songs contain spoken passages of Franz Kafka and the mood of the music fits well with the city and its prodigal son.
The main character is a single male in his 30's. His occupation is one that is instantly recognizable, but also possibly inscrutable, like a postman or a zookeeper, so that we can be easily lulled into a false sense of comfort. We purport to follow him, like an invisible cameraman, one who happens to enjoy wallowing in the minutiae of daily life.
The introduction is deliberate, to allow us to better understand our main character. Let's call him Émil to save ourselves the typing down the road. We observe him brushing his teeth, taking breakfast in the kitchen (and no, he does not dunk his bread into the milk), and read the morning paper. In the meantime, the first track, incidentally called The Blue Notebooks, plays in the background, accompanied by a French documentarist's dry voiceover, et voici sa brosse à dents, perchée à côté d'une photo de sa mère, dont les traces de larmes tachent encore la pellicule photographique après toutes ces années. The thesis is not apparent at this juncture, and one might be tempted to believe in being conned into one of those ponderous artsy flicks where nothing happens.
Émil goes to work and, much to our chagrin, we realise his job is just as boring as we'd expected. Just as the tedium becomes unbearable, the first dramatic conflict occurs. An unexpected telephone call from a distant relative, the discovery of a dead pigeon in the gutter by a road, geometric patterns of sunlight passing through billowing leaves, any of these events would trigger a memory, the blossomming of a seed buried deep within the subconscious. Cue On the Nature of Daylight. The brook becomes a stream, is joined by tangential currents, rages to a crescendo of strings, to announce a realization, a sea change, a providential impulse.
My first musically inspired moving picture is based on The Blue Notebooks, by Max Richter, a gorgeous collection of contemporary classical pieces. Here's my first dilemma. Do I delineate a story plot to the flow of the indivdual songs, or do the images attempt to evoke themes from the emotional response to the collective work? True to my nature, I aim to compromise...
This story is and has to be set in Prague, as a few of the songs contain spoken passages of Franz Kafka and the mood of the music fits well with the city and its prodigal son.
The main character is a single male in his 30's. His occupation is one that is instantly recognizable, but also possibly inscrutable, like a postman or a zookeeper, so that we can be easily lulled into a false sense of comfort. We purport to follow him, like an invisible cameraman, one who happens to enjoy wallowing in the minutiae of daily life.
The introduction is deliberate, to allow us to better understand our main character. Let's call him Émil to save ourselves the typing down the road. We observe him brushing his teeth, taking breakfast in the kitchen (and no, he does not dunk his bread into the milk), and read the morning paper. In the meantime, the first track, incidentally called The Blue Notebooks, plays in the background, accompanied by a French documentarist's dry voiceover, et voici sa brosse à dents, perchée à côté d'une photo de sa mère, dont les traces de larmes tachent encore la pellicule photographique après toutes ces années. The thesis is not apparent at this juncture, and one might be tempted to believe in being conned into one of those ponderous artsy flicks where nothing happens.
Émil goes to work and, much to our chagrin, we realise his job is just as boring as we'd expected. Just as the tedium becomes unbearable, the first dramatic conflict occurs. An unexpected telephone call from a distant relative, the discovery of a dead pigeon in the gutter by a road, geometric patterns of sunlight passing through billowing leaves, any of these events would trigger a memory, the blossomming of a seed buried deep within the subconscious. Cue On the Nature of Daylight. The brook becomes a stream, is joined by tangential currents, rages to a crescendo of strings, to announce a realization, a sea change, a providential impulse.
