Posted on December 30, 2016 at 7:53 am
Many thanks to Kristen Lopez for inviting me on her Ticklish Business podcast to talk about some of our favorite old movie discoveries in 2016. We talked about “The Harvey Girls,” “The Second Face,” “Homicidal,” “Madam Satan,” My Sister Eileen,” and “Keeper of the Flame.”
Posted on October 8, 2016 at 8:00 am
What do you mean, the “tao” of Disney?
The ‘tao’ of Disney refers to the fact that Walt’s vision seems to have written the universal language for the animated feature. What has sprung from it is the central core of how animated features are made and ultimately what we come to expect from them. In truth, there’s Disney and then there’s everyone else. It seems to stand above the other studios in terms of their output.
What elements of Walt Disney’s original vision are most evident in the studio’s productions today?
Today they are still holding on to the emotional levels and character developments that Walt put into place. The original vision of Walt Disney can be seen most evidently in his first five animated features; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. The emotional levels are present even in films like Frozen and Zootopia but also the desire to go the extra mile. It’s the writing that has maintained Disney’s vision. Characters and ideas come first, not just the desire to jump onto whatever is popular at the moment.
You can tell me — who is your all-time favorite Disney animated character? Live action character? Song?
Uh-boy. The Disney company is 93 years old and they’ve made how many movies? I really can’t even begin to list the characters and songs that are my favorites. There isn’t one, there’s shouldn’t be. Disney has such a rich history with its characters and its music that choosing just one is impossible.
Will Disney ever return to hand-drawn animation?
At this point, no. Disney tried nine years ago to test the market to see if it would work again with The Princess and the Frog but it didn’t do as well as they had hoped. CG is the new landscape and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
Which Disney movie is the scariest?
For me, the scariest Disney picture was always Pinocchio. Concept terror, of course. I can’t imagine a more frightening scenario than bad children being turned into donkeys and sent off to work in salt mines and circuses. That’s a horrifying idea! They are punished, essentially, forever. They can’t talk so their parents think that they have effectively disappeared off the face of the Earth. I didn’t see this film when I was a kid, but if I had the message would have been with me forever. Behave yourself!
The movie that made people cry?
I’m going to say Bambi for the death of his mother, but I can’t imagine anyone not being touched by Dumbo’s late night visit to his mother’s cage after she’s been locked up. At the moment moment when little Dumbo wipes his tears on his mother’s trunk I defy anyone with a heartbeat to keep a dry eye.
How do you do a podcast about such a visual medium?
Conversation and lots of it. You speak as if the listener knows what you’re talking about. Doug and I assume that our listeners have already seen the film that we are talking about. We speak of the visuals in a specific way, I don’t think there’s quite a difficulty in that. It’s like talking about movies with your friends.
If you could inspire your audience to check out one overlooked Disney gem, what would it be?
The Rescuers Down Under. I know why the movie was overlooked in 1990 but I’m not sure why it continues to get overlooked today. Most people don’t know that this film came out between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, and even fewer know that it had the sad misfortune of opening on November 16, 1990, the exact same day as the release of Home Alone. That’s really too bad because this movie works on so many levels, I hate to think that anyone is overlooking it. The animation in this film is gorgeous, and the story is beautifully told as well. It’s a great adventures. It’s got great action scenes, a great villain voiced by George C. Scott, the backgrounds are breathtaking. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s a fantastic adventure film. Why are we overlooking this one?
Posted on October 1, 2016 at 7:28 am
My favorite new podcast is “Crazy Good Turns,” stories of kindness and generosity. Episodes so far include a program to send military veterans to the world’s disaster zones, a preacher who was “conned by God“ to provide inspiration and support in a troubled city, a sort of Johnny Appleseed of children’s playgrounds, and a family who created a program to help first responders in memory of a brother who died on 9/11. They do a good deed of their own by including music from emerging and innovative performers in the podcast. It is available on iTunes and Stitcher, and you can suggest your own good deeds or music groups for future episodes.
Posted on September 18, 2016 at 4:23 pm
NPR reports on an app created by a teenager to help other teens with one of the most agonizing challenges of middle school and high school — finding a place to sit at lunch.
She told NPR
Pretty much, kids can sign up as ambassadors for a Sit With Us club and agree to post open lunches so that anyone who has the app and has nowhere to go can find a table and, hopefully, make some new friends….This way, it’s very private. It’s through the phone. No one else has to know. And you know that you’re not going to be rejected once you get to the table.
Posted on August 7, 2016 at 3:49 pm
More from Comic-Con: Jesse Harlin is a freelance composer who has been in the industry now for 17 years, 10 years with Lucasfilm, working on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” games. “I just finished up working on Mafia III for 2K and I’m still working on Star Wars stuff. The way that we handle it is very much like scoring for film or TV in so far as a lot of what we do is about creating themes for characters and then you extrapolate different moods based on those sorts of themes.”
It gets complicated. “There was a period of time where I felt like when I was in college my main instrument was voice and then I certainly felt like for a while my main instrument became Excel. Yes you spend a lot of time in spreadsheets.” He gets started early on, when it may be all he has to go on is some concept art and what he hears from the people working on the game. “We talk to the developers and we figure out what is important to them in terms of what they want, how they want the music to function. And game is such a broad term that it means everything from slot machine, mobile games to extraordinarily cinematic enormous games that take hundreds of hours to complete and they all need music in between. So what a development studio may be looking for may be very different from a slot machine game or soccer game or racing game than what it might be to a very cinematic game. I tend to work on the more cinematic score.”
We’ve come a long way from the tinny one-note songs played in the early Atari games. “As a game composer I have recorded at Abbey Road with the London Symphony orchestra. So there are concert calls across the world where video game music is being performed. It’s not the bleeps and bloops that it was in 1984. I’ve written articles about in the industry about how you should use orchestration to create a signature sound for your game so that it stands out, it doesn’t just become a fairly genetic orchestra or score. And I have a lot of fun. The most recent game I did was Mafia III. It is a convoluted story and it’s set in 1968 in a fictionalized city that’s a New Orleans analog so rather than doing an orchestral score which is what Mafia II and Mafia I had, we did an all blues score and we recorded in Nashville with these just absolutely astounding blues musicians and so it’s got dobro and it’s got upright bass and one of the things that I used a lot is board piano which is a really gorgeous sound because what I was trying to do is score the game cinematically but not with an orchestra. So how do you take traditional blues instruments the kind of things that might play at blues club on a Friday night, how do you take those instruments and made them sound cinematic and dramatic? I was replacing my string section with things like Hammond organ and board piano. I had a blast. And one of the things we did I don’t know if anybody else had done is I brought in three guys who were drum majors from one of the universities in Nashville and they did step dancing body percussion. I really wanted that signature sound. It’s actually getting a vinyl release as well, so it will be on iTunes and it will be on vinyl.”
Harlin prefers scoring games “because I’m totally passionate about interactivity. And the thing that amazes me is that in games as a medium, every person that plays it can experience a different thing than someone else. It can also be extremely personal. Every time you watch a film it’s the same every time for every person who sees it. It’s not always the case with games.
