THIS STORY WILL BE TELEVISED

Recently I've been thinking a lot about "art". Maybe it all started with Nuit Blanche. Or maybe it began earlier, with the Word on the Street, a huge open air book fair we have here every year.

For the first time in a long time I found myself gravitating towards a stall of comic books, graphic novels and manga/anime. I used to be a major comic book freak. Mostly the super heroes, mostly Marvel, though I like Batman before Batman was cool and I had a thing for the Flash, though I really don't know why ... I pretty much learned to read through comic books. I can remember my brother Ed sitting down with me with an old Daredevil comic book (when he still had the yellow and black costume) and reading it to me while I looked at the pictures. I wrote about this here

When I was a kid I had a pretty advanced vocabulary and I credit that entirely to comic books. I remember doing a book report on Greek mythology and writing how Hercules was pretty much invulnerable .. this may have been grade four or five. My teacher clearly did not believe that I knew what the word meant so I explained it: "It means you can't hurt him .. like Superman"

I was still reading when the graphic novel phase began. I read the Dark Knight of course, and I remember a one off graphic novel called Empire, illustrated by Howard Chaykin and written by Samuel Delaney, one of my favorite science fiction writers .. or any other kind of writer.

One of the last comics I remember reading was Watchmen, but I only read a couple of issues before it finished its run. Which brings us to Word on the Street. The booth I went to had all of the issues of Watchman in a single book form; I've heard rumours of a movie being made and I always wanted to finish reading it, so I bought it.

There were also a lot of manga/anime books at the booth. This is not a world with which I am overly familiar. I've seen Akira and Be-Bop Cowboy and bits of pieces of other anime on TV. But I can't say I am overly familiar with this art form, though I've always liked the look. My friend Elizabeth however is a total anime goddess and often features beautiful artwork on her blog. There were a few books of assorted manga art so Collette and I decided to pick her up a couple .. one of them I liked so much I bought myself a copy.

A winged girl with a sword, armour .. and a skirt ... what's not to love? Well, maybe the only thing lovelier is this girl in her kimono
When I sent the books to Elizabeth I made notes on some of the pictures that I particularly liked. I was looking at the images as works of art, and making comments like "I like the way he does the hair and makes it look like it is alive" or commenting on the use of shadows and light. Beth contends that this is because I work in the video business; as a novelist, she looked at the same images and created little stories for each one. I did the same thing .. except I wanted to put all the pictures together and make a storyboard with them.

Beth calls herself a storyteller (which she certainly is) but I too can wear that mantle. I have always been a writer .. poetry, fiction, plays .. I used to write voraciously. For a big part of my life that is probably the one thing that people knew about me ... "oh, that's Victor, he writes" When I got into the video business, the "creative" writing tapered off (I still write scripts for a living) largely because I found a new outlet for my storytelling.

I consider editing to be the true storytelling aspect of the video creation process. Whether or not the script is mine, regardless of who shot or produced the video, it is in the editing that the story is put together. Videos and movies are shot out of sequence, of course, if you have five scenes in one locale they are all shot at the same time, regardless of the time line .. so Scene one, scene six, scene twelve, separated in the story by years perhaps, are all shot on the same day. Later, in my editing computer, they are put in their proper sequence. Then, adding elements like music .. so important to video, I look as music, even background music, as a kind of wordless narration or even another character ... and colorizing and titles ... all of this helps to tell the story. So yes, I'm still a storyteller.

Which brings us to Watchmen. This is a great book, period, comic or not. I won't go into a review of the story but you should really read this thing ... it will totally change your opinion about superhero books. It is a very literate graphic novel, not only does it involve lots of dialogue, the story is relatively complex, with lots of characters, flashbacks, parallel story lines, philosophy, psychology, etc. It references popular culture, ancient cultures, politics, science, religion .. it really is a novel. But it also really is graphic.

Reading the book again, I could see why they want to make it into a movie. Dave Gibbons frames his panels like a movie ... extreme tight close ups, so tight they don't even make sense then, through three or four panels, he pulls back to reveal the entire scene. It is really quite breathtaking. Sometimes these panels are accompanied by script, sometimes they are just images and I found that to be extremely effective.

If I was to make a "movie" whenever I start blocking one out in my mind, it is the images I deal with first. When I did my student movies, years ago, I started with scripts ... long, dialogue heavy, description-rich scripts. I was still into my writing stage then, it was quite common for me to blast off a hundred page science fiction story in a couple of days. So when thinking "movie" I thought word first. Making those movie taught me a lot, of course, but even later when I created a couple of "fictional" short films, I started the creation process with scripts, written words; when I envisioned a scene, I did it in terms of describing it like a passage from a novel: "The scene begins outside, in a park at night with autumn leaves laying on the ground, almost seeming to glow in the crepuscular light ..." In my mind, I could see the scene perfectly, but I was still conceiving it in literary terms.

Working as an editor for so many years has changed that. Yes, I consider myself a storyteller. Yes, I still enjoy writing, that desire to write is pretty much why this blog exists. But when working in a visual medium ... I think visually. (wow, I am just a genius of the obvious, aren't I?)

Now, when I think about creating a movie, I think of the imagery first. Instead of a script, a page filled with words, I would rather do a storyboard, with actual images to block the scene out. In my editing software, I have a timeline where I take video clips and drop them down into this workspace, connecting one clip to the other, to create a linear sequence. The clips can have audio attached, can have dialogue and obviously that it a way I build the timeline, but I like the idea of moving the clips around like little pictures. Whereas Elizabeth looked at the pictures in the anime book and perhaps wrote a story in her head for each page, I wanted to put all the pages together, lay them out like images in my timeline, and create the story that way.

One of my favorite movies is Rio Bravo, a western by Howard Hawks starring John Wayne and Dean Martin and Claude Akins.

One of the things I love about this movie is the opening scene. In it we are introduced to Akins, the town bully. We meet Martin, a man who was once a dapper lawman and who is now the town drunk. We meet Wayne, the current sheriff and Martin's former friend. In the saloon where Akins is drinking with his buddies, Martin debases himself by begging for money to get booze; Akins makes him retrieve a coin from a used spittoon. Martin, a once proud capable man allows himself to be abused in order to get his drink. As if inspired by the drunk's subservience, Akin kills a man "just to watch him die" (OK I felt a need for a little Johnny Cash reference). In comes Wayne and he lays Akins out with his carbine and drags him to jail; before he leaves, Wayne addresses his old friend Martin, expressing his disgust and sadness about what he has become ...

What makes all of this truly interesting is the fact that there is no ... or little ... dialogue in this scene. It is several minutes long and without any words we learn so much: Akins is a bully because he is a man of power and position and the town allows him to be cruel, Martin has fallen a long long way and sees no way to pull himself up,l Wayne wants to help his friend but his cowboy code restricts him in how he can do that .... all without words. Is the very first scene in the movie and with out any dialogue at all, Hawks efficiently sets up the rest of the story to come. Hawks began his movie making career in the silent era so it is really not surprising that he could stage the scene in this way to such great effect.

Dialogue still has its place in movies. One of my favorite movie makers of recent time is writer/director David Mamet. A former playwright, his movies are some of the most plot based, dialogue driven movies you will ever see. House of Games, Things Change, Homicide, The Heist, The Spanish Prisoner ... all great movies, heavily plotted and filled with some of them most dizzying and intricate dialogue you have ever heard. Mamet's movies work due to his tight plotting and relying on fine actors like Joe Mantegna, Gene Hackman and Steve Martin. Not options generally available to us amateur film makers.

The Nuit Blanche exhibits showed me that art takes a lot of forms and sometimes those forms .. be they sculpture or words or video or big plastic things hung in the ceiling of the Eaton Centre .. define the art. I don't really see that with the video. I may storyboard a scene instead of creating in the word processor but I am still telling a story, it is just a different way to view it. When I looked at the pictures in the anime books I saw the stories, I wondered who these characters were and what they were doing and that is a testament to the skill of the artist ... even with a single panel, he was able to convey a sense of time, place, personality ... so he is a storyteller too.

THIS POST HAS A SOUNDTRACK

I'm a musician. Let me pause to make some room for the snickering. OK, for those who know me that is outright raucous laughter. I understand it. For those who do not know me let me make this perfectly clear: I cannot play an instrument. I can barely hold a guitar the proper way. I'm the only guy who can blow into an empty plastic pop bottle off key. And I can't sing. No, I mean I can't sing the way Mike Tyson can't write iambic pentameter. I remember telling this woman that I couldn't sing and she calmly assured me that of course I could sing and that that I have just been conditioned by cold hearted music teachers in school ... then I sang. I sang so badly not only did she go deaf, she went blind ...

Still, I'm a musician. And it all relates to video. When I was inspired by Elizabeth McClung's weekend adventure challenge to cut a video with every one's pictures and video, I began thinking about the music before I had seen any of the images. For me, cutting often is all about the music, it certainly begins there. Particularly if it is images only; music becomes tremendously important. In the video business we call this "music video" style editing; not in the annoying lip syncing, belly button flashing, hair flipping, bling flashing actually promoting a song sort of way, but simply putting image to music, or the other way around.


For the Weekend Adventure video I wanted something upbeat with a nice pace to reflect the fun implicit in the images but I always wanted something with a little substance, with lyrics that conveyed optimism and yet could also understand the poignancy of Elizabeth's challenge: Go out, live life, have fun, cause life oft times throws you a curve ball regardless of what you may be planning. Jem's It's Just a Ride fit the bill perfectly. An upbeat, catchy melody, and a message that was life affirming because it acknowledged that the ride is filled with bumps and detours and doors opening in your path but it's still a ride and all rides should be enjoyed.

When I sang the song in my head (even singing in my head caused my cat Gypsy to wince, that is how pathetic I am) I looked at the images on the computer and it all just came together for me. In my editing style the song goes down first ... first, even though this is a video. Music first so the images could follow the music. Sure, I had an idea what I wanted the images to do; grouping them by "adventure" starting off with each individuals pics in a group to help with identification (I had some quotations rolling as well) and theme. That was pretty obvious and I certainly could have done that without music. But video has a rhythm. It has a rhythm even without music, without a soundtrack. We've all seen static images left on too long ... it can illicit a physical sensation that is almost painful, like your chest tightening. Maybe that's just me. I feel it. An image not given enough time I feel right behind the eyes, like a brief flaring headache. So I put the music down first, and let that be the rhythm of the images.


In the editing software that I use (Final Cut Pro for all the geeks in the house) I can set a duration for any still image I bring into the program. The default is 10 seconds .. way, way, way too long. I have two presets: One at five seconds and one at four. Four seconds is actually how long I want the images to last on screen. I think that duration gives even a completely static image enough time to "tell its story" to give its information without overstaying its welcome, if you will. So why the five seconds? Because if you put transitions on either side of the image (like a dissolve, fade to black etc) that eats up some of the time that each image lives on the screen.


That length is not a hard and fast rule of course. If you watch the Weekend Adventure video, there is a section just before the chorus where Jem sings "break down, don't you break down, break down .." and I cut photos into each one of the "break downs" which is less than four seconds, more like two seconds or so. I'm betting that those photos don't seem less than half the length of others, because the images are moving and they are matched to the music in a way that it makes sense; it flows.


I think I've always seen images and music as elements that should not only exist together, but need to go together to be at their most effective. This probably comes from the movies. A great soundtrack does not just accompany a movie, it enhances it, improves it, embellishes it. The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed; the use of the zither as Joseph Cotton chases Orson Welles around the streets and through the sewers of post war Vienna ... the jarring music and Reed's off kilter camera angles and the brilliant black and white chiaroscuro all combined to give those scenes a breathless, edgy quality. Combined, mind you. Reed's camera work and editing is brilliant but that music adds so much to the scene, it would not be as effective without it.

There are dozens of examples; a bit more recently The Ghost and the Darkness, set in colonial Africa, uses African inspired music to great effect. The music is heavily percussive and filled with chants and not only does it reflect the film's location, it pushes the movie pace. In the early scenes, when Val Kilmer arrives in Africa to build his bridge, all optimistic and filled with testosterone, the music is big, orchestral, effusive and with the African rhythm more subtle, hidden under the strings. As the story progresses and the man eating lions begin to terrorize the area, as all of Kilmer's beautiful clean engineering is destroyed by feral violence, the strings are stripped away from the soundtrack; the drums come out, thudding like blood and the chants become more guttural, grunting, like the hunger of the lions and the fear of the men that leaves breathing short and blood hammering. The scenes are not cut to the beat but the beat informs them, it adds the poetry to the language of the visual images.

I certainly don't aspire to such artistry but I think I understand that power of music to inform image. I have a certain reputation for it in my field. I have worked with other editors on long, complex corporate videos; usually in such cases where the bulk of the video is highly expository, there is a desire to break up the talking heads and close up shots of steel presses with musical montages. These little scenes provide a reprise from the pure information but they still must have a purpose, they still must illustrate something about the product or company. Often, working on these kinds of videos the refrain was "let Kellar do the freaking montage".

Cutting to music is more than just matching cuts to the beat. It is understanding how images need to match up to the rhythm; when cutting to extremely fast beats I like detail shots, extreme close ups, like a pair of eyes or a just the logo from a large machine or the curve of a neck of a bottle of chef sauce (hey, I never said corporate video was romantic). In corporate video you use, largely, instrumental music, because you do not want to distract from the imagery and the message.

That kind of cutting is challenging, both on a technical level as well as a creative one. Where it gets more purely creative for me (let me whisper the word "artistic" in your ear in my most manly of voices) is not just cutting images to the beat, its using music to illustrate the image. This is where you you lay down the images first then stripe in the music afterwards ("striping" is a perfectly archaic video term for inserting a video element, it has to do with the way old school video decks used helical heads to record image and sound onto tape ... wake up, we're done with the geek speak now). Here, the challenge is to find the music that not just compliments the image, but illustrates it. I've been told I have a talent in this area. My friend Karen Baldwin-Porter, an actual for real can play an instrument musician asked me to put together a memorial slideshow for her husband David; when she saw it she told me "You got me with the music, I knew you would get me with the music" I created a similar slideshow as a memorial to Collette's mother Margaret ... and really, you know, I'm happy to do it, but its a duty I do not want to make a habit of. People also complimented the music, were even surprised at the song choices but agreed that it gave impact to the pictures. You can also take a look at this Hayley video where I had some fun cutting to the music.

That is how I am a musician, I think. I'm never gonna be able to play an instrument. Tom Harpell, my friend, my teacher, my mentor in all things video and a pretty mean blues musician, once told me that he could teach anyone, even me, how to play the blues harp. Tom, I love ya brother, but we all know that ain't gonna happen. Its ok. No regrets. I have my own way of playing music. You tune up your harp. Give me a second while I start the computer ...