The movie Red Riding Hood trailer makes me think the tag line should be “it’s The Company Of Wolves meets Twilight“, and it’s directed by the original Twilight movie’s Catherine Hardwicke. Hopefully that does NOT mean this one is as bad as that series of films, because it does have a lot of good story potential. There are some more pictures here, and the film itself will hit the big screen in just a few weeks, on March 11th.
The movie Love looks amazing based on this trailer supplied by Angels and Airwaves and former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge. Release date is set for 14 February 2011, according to Geeks of Doom, as a combined CD and DVD.
The first video is from a band that lost their instruments but refused to stop playing. New York Cities Atomic Tom took music creation apps from their smart phones, hit the subways, and recorded another version of their local hit. If you like the song, you can download it free on iTunes. I am sure Steve Jobs thinks it is another advertising campaign generated by his company. The second track is from Future Music Camp Mannheim 2009, and features 2 conductors direction 12 people running the Brian Eno music app Bloom. They ran the camp again in 2010, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was coming around again this year.
JoeHisaishi has built some interesting music for some quality Anime productions, most notably for Hayao Miyazaki’s incredible animated stories. Miyazaki is the world famous co-founder of Studio Ghibli,, and some of the wonderful stories that Joe built the scores for include Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. From which list you will no doubt have figured out that Disney Distributes Ghibli in the US, because their quality for amazing animation is on a par. And Joe has been doing some of the best musical scores for Ghibli, which is a bit more complex than it might at first seem.
We all know that every good Movie and TV show, whether live action or animation, has an opening and closing theme that ideally sets the tone and expectations for the program as a whole. And we all realize (even if we don’t notice it on any specific show) that within any good program there are variations of one or both of those theme songs that enhance scenes emotionally and make it obvious that we are in a chase, or combat, or romance, or one of the other standard kinds of situations. The ones that become easiest to miss are also the ones that stitch together the presentation at the most basic level; the interstitial music, the tones or brief riffs that introduce a transition from one kind of scene to the next. Trust me when I say Joe Hisaishi has mastered all of those musical flavors, and built some of the most complete and inspiring sound tracks for each of the projects he has taken on. Just in case you still think you don’t already know who he is, this short selection of tracks should prove otherwise to you.
And for those in the audience that thought if it wasn’t Rock-N-Roll I wasn’t interested, you were mostly right. But I haven’t heard orchestral music twisted around and tied tight to a story line like this since I sat in the audience and had Leonard Bernstein play Peter and the Wolf for me live one day; that kind of experience really does change your perspective.
Karen Gillan recorded this wonderful variation on Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl a while ago, with the lyrics modified to explain why the original song was released in humorous detail. If you are wondering why that song, funny though it is, belongs in a sci-fi blog post, you haven’t been paying attention; Karen has been playing Amy Pond for about a year or so, companion to Matt Smith’s Doctor Who. The song was originally part of the Channel 4 program the Kevin Bishop Show, which means if you are trying to see this from the UK it won’t work, you will want to see the Daily Motion version. There is also a nice interview with her over at 411 Mania done a while ago.
The Alice Files is the first performance I know of that combines smart phone apps with musical instruments and video processing and display in real time for stage presence, all from only hand held devices. For the example included here, Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland was the narrative starting point, and I managed to locate both of the parts. And then there was the Doctor Who theme song…
