MUSICAL THEATRE’S INFLUENCE ON SOUND DESIGN AND MUSIC IN FILM:
Keeping the musical framing of the story in synchronisation with the character/subject organically.
Howard Ashman was an American playwright, artistic director and lyricist with a firm rooting in musical theatre. He wrote and directed such works as ‘God bless you’, ‘Smile’, and ‘Little shop of Horrors’. In 1986 (at the age of 36) Ashman began a collaboration with the Disney Company, turning his creative efforts to film. Disney gave him the option of three projects to work on, two live action projects and an animated musical. Ashman leapt at animation and began work on ‘the little mermaid.’
Ashman put a great emphasis on telling stories through music, he believed it was “central to what Disney is”. He presented a case to the staff at Disney that animation and musical storytelling were made for each other, he saw “a very very strong connection between these two media”. Howard understood that wherever you’re creating something, where the songs are in a context bigger than themselves, you’re creating musical theatre. They started taking the keynotes/high points of their story, where the characters can’t help but let their emotions run out, turning these points into pieces of musical theatre. “these songs aren’t just bolstered on, they’re the tentpoles that hold the movie up”
The animators at Disney commended Ashman’s ability to seamlessly transition from spoken word to song, he did this by backing the musical vamp up under the dialogue preceding the song. Using this technique they could go from a contextual scene, to a musical emotional scene smoothly, keeping the audience’s suspension of disbelief afloat and keeping them invested in the story. This gradual transition of emotional intensity is intended to organically express how a characters emotional intensity will change overtime, keeping the musical framing of the story in synchronisation with the character/subject.
Usage:
This brings me to how I could apply Ashman’s principals of seamless transition to song, and musical theatre influence to sound design for film. I would like to explore the effectiveness of creating smooth transitions from diegetic sound in contextual scenes, to more musical sound design for the emotional high points of a film. How do I create seamless transitions? One idea I would like to experiment with is using locational/contextual elements to build the score (or at least the beginning). As an example, vocoding diegetic sound to begin a score, or using the rhythm of someone’s speech or movement to build a drum score, even using diegetic sound as the samples for the beat. I want to try to tie the musical scoring of a scene as tightly as I can to the visual context.
Sources:
Waking Sleeping Beauty Bonus Features – Howard Ashman : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PggMaREbs0
The problem with Tarzan :
The life and work of Howard Ashman:
Disney Collaboration, 1986-1991: