Is hiring a second unit director a bad idea?

[Josh Bass]

was that a pun?

Deja View?

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Originally Posted by Donald McPherson

I think this is a case of DeJaVue
https://www.dvinfo.net/forum/techniq...-director.html

Most of his threads are recycled topics he revisits. While his topics are phrased as questions he really is only looking for confirmation of what he wants to do. Sometimes he capitulates but often this is only temporary in a few months or a year he'll be asking the same questions. I get the feeling he bounces around looking someone to tell him what he wants to hear.

[Paul R Johnson]

I always wonder why when a question gets the answers that loads of us could have predicted on page one, why Ryan tries to rephrase his questions to get different answers. This topic wasn't about a second unit director at all, it was about hiring a director who can do the things Ryan finds tricky. The key factor in all Ryans posts is simply that he's not too good with people. We find him a polite inoffensive fella who really wants to make movies - but simply doesn't have any talent in that area. Ryan isn't alone - when I was teaching we'd always put students into little boxes - where they'd have exactly the same strengths and weaknesses as students in preceding cohorts. Some were eternal researchers, and just never got around to producing anything because they consistently got stuck when research produced conflicting info - and they'd be trying to make sense of it, and never moved on. They were the people who always volunteered but rarely delivered, or delivered a warped version of the intention because tiny, but critical things got missed.

I remember a composer being contracted to write music for 3 opera singers and a big orchestra. The person who commissioned him was swayed by his charisma, larger than life personality and name on posters from outside movie theatres. On the first day I met him I went to see the Artistic Director and told him we needed an assistant for the guy. No budget, not included in the plans, no office space etc etc - why do we need an assistant? Because he cannot read rom write music. He's down there with the orchestra and the singers and is humming everyone's parts, expecting them to learn them. Every job he'd had, he had an assistant to write down the music when he hummed it!

I've had to heavily redact it to protect the reputations of many really good people, but this is what was said in the press at the time. You can still imagine the absolute chaos of the event. Fundamental issues like time - playing music from a large oil rig support ship offshore was a technical feat, but since nobody has invented a time machine, it was seconds late arriving on the shore. Somebody on land was supposed to be singing to the music, dressed as Napoleon (nobody really understood why) Every single Arts or community group had been seconded - so yes, there really was a model boat club contingent working with real opera singers and a load of people rollerskating (or at least trying to rollerskate, as a beach area is not that friendly to roller-skates). The BBC were going to broadcast it, but I think they realised the chances of it working were zero. This review was the kindest.

NOTHING went right. Even the main sponsor, XXXXXX, lost the use of part of their XXXX two days before - not exactly the best of advertisements. And it had all sounded like such a good idea in the beginning - XXX a science fiction inter-active community event set on and around the quiet XXX resort, XX near to XX - a giant happening that would bring professional and amateur together as part of XXXX Year of Opera and Musical Theatre.


In the event, it all came horribly unstuck. XXX, late of XXX endeavour, drafted in to co-ordinate this mammoth undertaking (advance publicity talked of 22 ships of various hues and sizes, a helicopter, 19 vehicles, and a cast of over 500 local people) must have despaired as several hundred people voted with their feet and ''evacuated'' themselves from the seafront in plummeting temperatures and stiffening wind.

A coming together it was not. Over-blown, miscalculated in tone and effect, what started out as twin-stranded, a mixing of actuality - an incident at sea involving a supposed ecological phenomenon (a ''stone-plant'') - and a re-enactment of a Victorian model yacht ''prom'' - descended into risible farce.

What had gone wrong? To be fair, XXX was only one component - but a major one - of a scheme that suffered from its own supra-ambition, mixing opera and open-air daring-do in what turned out to be an unholy alliance.

If a finger has to be pointed, it has to be in the direction of XXXX's arts development officer JXXXX, a personable, rangey former performance artist, who, reported XXXX, originally ''wanted to do an outdoor site-specific show at the model yacht pond'' plus her perhaps unwise decision to draft in artists - XXXX, composer XXX, and visual artist XXX - who had never worked together before.

XXX proceeded to expand on XXX's original brief, taking in not only the beach and seafront site but also the harbour entrance, creating, in the process, a so-called ''national news incident'' with reporters and interviewers, high-speed craft, and even a dredger.

All to no avail. Whilst XXX successfully seemed to overcome the logistics of co-ordinating different craft without crashing them into each other (no mean feat) - one magical moment had a number of outboard-motor craft speeding across the darkened beach-front to XXXX's thrilling electronic oceanic score - the two strands simply never coalesced, descending indeed to a reductio ad absurdum the creators can surely never have envisaged.


XXX's ''sonic playground'' - a direct but inventive steal of forms and styles from end-of-the-pier Wurlitzers to sea-influenced hymns and deconstructionism - deserved better. So indeed did all the people of XXX. A sad end to a two-year public and private-sponsored project that is looking to such arts-led events to help regenerate an area weighed down by youth unemployment and industrial decline, and with almost no professional arts profile.


XXX no doubt will bounce back. XXX, the whole regenerative project in which she is involved, of which XXXX is but the start, has just won a #400,000 lottery grant for a programme of artists-in-residence involving youngsters. XXX chief executive XXXX, despite this initial set-back, is optimistic, too.

''Everybody gets so hypnotised by big buildings issues. But I believe the real enjoyment and birth place of new opera for both professionals and audiences isn't in the big buildings but is happening here in village halls, beaches, and potting sheds, and in the interface between professional and amateur. ''I think there's a revolution happening in the eastern region. It may take a little while before people realise the impact of what's going on. But I truly believe it's where the future of opera lies because it's being done in and around where people live rather than being this hugely expensive event people have to plan all year to do.'' For all their sakes, I hope he's right.

[Brian Drysdale]

A number of musicians can't read music, but in cases like that I would've assumed that the assistant would be part of the deal and they would be brought in before the orchestra and singers were involved.

[Paul R Johnson]

The three foreign concert opera singers got engaged on International contracts and lots of it was non-stop wailing, totally tuneless and impossible to learn - and there were pages and pages. Plenty of musicians can't read music, but an 80 piece orchestra has to. If you are a composer for works that need a symphony style orchestra, then you would normally even have somebody assigned to actually being in charge of the pads, but they are essentially copyists and musical grammar checkers. The image is from what the assistant musical director produced, and features the composer's input on the staves below.

[Brian Drysdale]

This composer seems to be putting in less than you'd expect. They don't seem to be a Irving Berlin, Lionel Bart, Anthony Newly, or Paul McCartney. I guess George Martin laid out the orchestration and score for the latter.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

The last two lines looks like a stock market chart or an ekg

[Greg Miller]

Originally Posted by Paul R Johnson

The image is from what the assistant musical director produced, and features the composer's input on the staves below.

Apparently the composer wants the fourth part to play a sawtooth wave, and the fifth part to play a sine wave. Since the frequencies are so low (only a few cycles per measure) they will be infrasonic, which is a blessing ... nobody will hear them.

If this guy got a job as a "composer," can someone sign me up for a high-paying gig as a Swahili translator?

Personally, I would rather hear a performance of 4'33" by John Cage, unless there are crying babies nearby, in which case there's a lot to be said for just going home and playing 4'33" on my own piano.

[Paul R Johnson]

Ryan would get on very well with John Cage, and a video that supported the 4'33" would be interesting - I've never thought of that one? I wonder if I could pop it on Youtube or would the content protection system catch me out? If they removed it, I wonder how I'd know.

EDIT - damn the BBC beat me to it in the Barbican series

YouTube (Short URL)

I'm not sure it was the best choice for the finale of the concert, but it's actually a good track to use a source of background for some uses - a study in coughing and sniffing maybe?