Enjoy your Thursday!

Making Music for Film

We're in the post production phase of our short films at school and I have to do the music for five films! Yes, it's stressful and is probably making me old before my time (especially when the editors decide to take their time - you know who you are), but with inspiration from the masters I have examples of below, making  music for film becomes magical and truly an enjoyable experience. I just love it when the timing falls into place and the film comes alive with sound that creates that ideal emotion.

Clint Mansell is, without a doubt, a musical genius. His Requiem for a Dream soundtrack is one of my favourites:



In Love with This Style

This reminds me of fairy tales, stories my grandma told me when I was just a little girl and it makes me want to spend a day in an English garden: playing with old fashioned watering cans, having tea and scones and painting roses red. If you wear the clothes, you can imagine the life, can't you?

Goodbye, Elizabeth

A childstar, a leading lady, two Oscars, seven husbands and a double set of eyelashes. This woman, an actress in Hollywood's Golden Age, was a legend - both official (the American Film Institute named her seventh on its Female Legends list) and in the hearts of millions.

Unfortunately, her fairytale came to an end this morning when she died after being hospitalized for congestive heart failure. At 79, her grace and spirit was still a light in her four children, many grand children and even great-grand children's lives.

Rest in Peace, Elizabeth Taylor...

"Everything makes me nervous - except making films."

"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they`re going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

 "My mother says I didn`t open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked."

"[2005] There`s still so much more to do. I can`t sit back and be complacent, and none of us should be. I get around now in a wheelchair, but I get around."

It is the Child...

 

"It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents."

~Eric Hoffer

Dancing to Degas

The Impressionist style may have been labeled old fashioned and unoriginal in the beginning of the 20th century, but that does not mean it got any less beautiful. Edgar Degas, the French master, created fairytale pieces with off-centre compositions and captured moments of movement and grace. Enjoy his incredible ballet paintings...

"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."

- Edgar Degas

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

"Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement."

Sunday Movie Music

It is cold outside and I was lucky to stumbled across this beautiful song. It matches the stormy weather and the mellow Sunday mood perfectly. Of course the composer is Hans Zimmer (who else?) with his masterful melodies. It makes me want to swap houses with some foreign stranger and fall in love with a handsome Englishman...

I love Iris's (Kate Winslet) voice over in the opening sequence of The Holiday:

I've found almost everything ever written about love to be true. Shakespeare said "Journeys end in lovers meeting." What an extraordinary thought. Personally, I have not experienced anything remotely close to that, but I am more than willing to believe Shakespeare had. I suppose I think about love more than anyone really should. I am constantly amazed by its sheer power to alter and define our lives. It was Shakespeare who also said "love is blind". Now that is something I know to be true. For some quite inexplicably, love fades; for others love is simply lost. But then of course love can also be found, even if just for the night. And then, there's another kind of love: the cruelest kind. The one that almost kills its victims. Its called unrequited love. Of that I am an expert. Most love stories are about people who fall in love with each other. But what about the rest of us? What about our stories, those of us who fall in love alone? We are the victims of the one sided affair. We are the cursed of the loved ones. We are the unloved ones, the walking wounded. The handicapped without the advantage of a great parking space! Yes, you are looking at one such individual. And I have willingly loved that man for over three miserable years! The absolute worst years of my life! The worst Christmas', the worst Birthday's, New Years Eve's brought in by tears and valium. These years that I have been in love have been the darkest days of my life. All because I've been cursed by being in love with a man who does not and will not love me back. Oh god, just the sight of him! Heart pounding! Throat thickening! Absolutely can't swallow! All the usual symptoms.

Enjoy the Rain

Photo: Ben Hassett

"The best kind of rain, of course, is a cozy rain.  This is the kind the anonymous medieval poet makes me remember, the rain that falls on a day when you'd just as soon stay in bed a little longer, write letters or read a good book by the fire, take early tea with hot scones and jam and look out the streaked window with complacency. "

~Susan Allen Toth

James Blunt's Tears and Rain - a perfect song to go with these rainy days...

Everyone's Irish Tonight...

... or last night. I'm proud to have some Irish heritage and could not love the people, the culture and the country more (no, I'm not referring to the overflow of alcohol, but more to the festive way in which the Irish can approach life.) Hope you had a spectacular St. Patrick's Day!

With all the green beer you could drink

St. Patti's Day film: The Boondock Saints

Where I Want to be Today: A Jane Austen Countryside

I want to walk through it

Dream in it

Imagine life in it

Write about it

Be free because of it

...but most importantly

Get lost in it...

We don't Receive Wisdom

“We don’t receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that none can take for us or spare us.”

- Marcel Proust

Praying for Japan

I would love to say "Happy Weekend" and be on my merry way, but considering what happened in the world today, I don't believe this weekend will be significantly joyful for many people. Near the east coast of Honshu, Japan, an earthquake of an incredible 8.9 magnitude occurred "as a result of thrust faulting on or near the subduction zone interface plate boundary between the Pacific and North America plates". This is the biggest earhtquake Japan has seen in over 140 years and it caused a Tsunami of approximately 10m.

Many have died and in the coming days, we will hear of many more. Alerts have been sent out as far as Hawaii, Australia, Peru and Nieu-Zealand, but the whole world should now stand together and pray that the destruction and devastation ends soon.

Purple Art and Melody

Here it is: the video with Eugene Paprocki's La Madeline, Johannesburg architecture and the incredible Yann Tiersen song, Comptine d'un autre été: L'apres Midi (heard in Amelié and Goodbye Lenin.)

Fun with Purple and Paintings

I am working on a one minute piece for a project where I should combine music, art, architecture and color to show how well they can blend. Here are some photoshopped images I'll be using...

The painting is based on a 2007 Eugene J. Paprocki work - I love the impressionist style!

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

The Road...

Oscar Magic

4 to Inception, 4 to The King's Speech, 3 to The Social Network, 2 to Alice and Wonderland and 10 out of 10 for brilliance! The 83rd annual Academy Awards were not only fun and glamorous, but the winners were definitely the most deserving. I must admit, I expected a different outcome after the Golden Globes, but The King's Speech was without a doubt the "Best Picture" considering all aspects, including cinematography, editing, directing, acting and art direction - a film that kept you gripped, expanded your knowledge and made you laugh every now and again.

Personally, I believe Hans Zimmer has deserved and Oscar for years, but Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross brought The Social Network to magical life. Colleen Atwood knows how to fuse fashion and drama and her long time collaboration with Tim Burton has truly brought beautiful works of fashion art to this world.

Even though there were mixed reactions toward Anne Hathaway and James Franco as hosts (they are not comedians, why should they feel obliged to be funny?), they kept the night going and made it entertaining - it is about the awards, anyway.

The Best Actors and Actresses of the night, Natalie Portman and Colin Firth were the cherries on top. Both portrayed vulnerable characters with flaws to overcome and ultimately stood for that confusing stages everyone experiences in life.

Some Fashion...