Thought for the week

"He that fights and runs away... didn't run away quick enough."

A master of the macabre

Following on from my digression a week or two ago about stop-motion, I shared with one of my Film classes the other day this grimly hilarious 1992 trilogy on 'Food' - my favourite piece of work (the most accessible, and straightforwardly funny - though still very dark, and with onion-skin layers of socio-political allegory) by the Czech experimental film-maker Jan Švankmajer, known particularly for his wonderfully bizarre stop-motion animations, many of which use the stop-motion technique with live actors. I wonder what it is about the Czechs that so draws them towards such dark and surreal satire? Kafka, Čapek, Hrabal, Havel - they all have this affinity for the twisting the everyday into something dreamlike and macabre.

One of my students told me a couple of days later she felt traumatised by this. I hope she was joking! (Well, I half-hope she wasn't joking. We allow teenagers their self-dramatising overstatements... but you kind of want students to be deeply moved by things, sometimes indeed disturbed, discomfited, distressed. I feel my recent spell of looking at World War One poetry with my English class was something of a failure because, although the children read the poetry eagerly and made lots of tie-ins with what they'd studied of the period in History... nobody cried... or got angry... or threw up. If you can read poems like Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' or 'The Sentry' without needing to run to the bathroom, you haven't really read them. But I digress.)

Anyway, here - for 'a bit of fun' is Švankmajer's Food - Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.


Breakfast comes from a 'vending machine'....

At lunchtime, a well-heeled businessman and a poor student share a table in a restaurant, and grow impatient as the waiter keeps ignoring them.


And for dinner a rather posh gent lovingly prepares for a solo feast. So many condiments!



Has that built up your appetite??

Thought for the week

"The obscure we see eventually; the completely obvious takes a little longer."

Scream, and scream again

For our Parent-Teacher Conference last weekend (it's an even bigger deal for us than it is for most schools, since our parents are all flying several hundred miles or more to visit us), I put up in my classroom as a conversation piece this picture of the ill-fated 'Private Wilhelm' - who gave his name to the scream that has become one of the most famous vocal effects in cinema history (already mentioned on this blog a couple of months ago); indeed, in recent decades it has become an industry in-joke, re-used endlessly.

Tristan Wong was the only one of my Film students to guess the picture's significance. Today he shared with us in class this amusing compilation of some of the many on-screen deaths this effect has been used for. (There are a number of others on Youtube too.)

This is a rather more comprehensive round-up that includes many earlier uses of the effect in the '50s and '60s (several in giant ant shocker Them!, which scared the bejesus out of me when I was about 8 or 10, one of my favourite early horror film experiences). Amongst these you can see the original Private Wilhelm moment in the 1953 Western The Charge at Feather River - not killed, at least, but receiving a very nasty arrow wound right through his thigh (if he's an American cavalry trooper, why is he in civilian clothes here? I've never seen this movie!), and the original original moment (the effect was first created for a scene of a man getting eaten by an alligator in the film Distant Drums a couple of years earlier; but for some reason it became permanently associated with its next incarnation as the Ooooh, that hurt! screech of poor Wilhelm).


And here's a nice potted history of the Wilhelm Scream by veteran Hollywood sound man Steve Lee (who curates the Hollywood Lost & Found blog and Youtube channel), in which he reveals that a popular singer named Sheb Wooley is the likeliest candidate to be the creator of the sound.

No 'thought' this week?

Well, NO - sorry, I forgot.

What with the big Parent-Teacher Conference this last weekend and what is - even by our eccentric standards - an exceptionally 'non-standard' week this week (we have two 'field trips' and a homestay weekend lined up, and our normal timetable has been re-jigged to compensate for a lot of 'lost' Saturdays recently...), there just hasn't been an opportunity either to post my weekly 'bon mot' here, or to write one on my whiteboard (the more important display site), as I usually do.

'Normal service' will be resumed next week.

How to play fast

I was just having an end-of-study-unit discussion with one of my Film classes about what they could have done better, especially in their 'Process Journal' blogging, and was tossing around some examples of the technical film-making expressions I would have liked to have seen them making more use of. One that came up was stop-motion - one that most of them were, thankfully, familiar with (although distinguishing the term from time-lapse presented a bit of a challenge).

Alvin Au offered this nice example of the former: the 'Mystery Guitar Man' performing Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee.... over the course of a number of days! (I wonder if he can actually play it at full speed?)

Thought for the week

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

This year's Halloween Micro-Fiction winners

This year my Library Committee decided to run a reprise of last year's successful Halloween Micro-Ghost Story (write a creepy tale in 50 words or less! - although we weren't terribly strict about the word limit).

I announced the winners and handed out prizes at Assembly this morning. All well worth a look. But don't read them too close to bedtime.....

Thought for the week

"The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life.

Try to be Shakespeare; leave the rest to fate!"

A welcome break

We have developed a policy at our pioneering little school of de-stressing ourselves at the end of each lengthy stretch of residential schooling with a nice off-campus excursion for the last few days before the vacation. This time, we've just been away for a couple of days to the picturesque river island of Tongzhou, 30 miles or so to the south-west of Hangzhou. We also spent an afternoon at the China National Football Academy in the nearby township of Tonglu, working with our partner NGO, China Grassroots Football, to stage a mass coaching event for local primary schoolchildren.

Here's a slideshow I made of some of my photographs from the trip.

This year's Halloween treat

Halloween was never much of a thing for me during my childhood, but it seems to have become a major highlight of the year for the Hong Kong children that I teach now. Since today was our last English class before the half-term break - and hence before All Hallow's Eve - I just shared with my students this creepy favourite of mine from the 1970s: La Cabina (The Telephone Box), a Spanish made-for-TV short directed by Antonio Mercedo. 

It was made in 1972 and won quite a few awards. And it has a special place in my heart - a love/hate kind of a place - because when I first saw it on British TV in the late 1970s (when I was about the same age as my students are now) I recognised it as a story that I had written myself a couple of years earlier. I was naturally pretty miffed that they'd stolen my idea without giving me a credit or any royalties. But then I discovered that it had been made some years before I wrote my story, and so I didn't have much of a case for an infringement of my intellectual property. I learned the hard lesson that there is no truly original idea in the world - or very, very rarely so, at any rate. (And I must acknowledge that my story was much more limited; it didn't really have the conspiracy/paranoia dimension that emerges in the second half of Snr Mercedo's macabre little masterpiece.)

Thought for the week

"It's not the destination that matters; it's the change of scene."

A world of silence

A year or so ago, upon unpacking all of my possessions after the move to my new home of Hangzhou, I discovered a DVD I had pretty well forgotten about: 11' 9" 01. I'd purchased it impulsively several years earlier and never got around to watching it. It's a conceptual project commemorating the first anniversary of 9/11, with eleven diverse film directors from around the world each presenting a personal response to the tragedy - and, to recall the date of 11th September 2001, each of these shorts is supposed to be exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame in length.

There are really only a few of them that are any good (the opening piece, by Iranian director, Samirah Makhmalbaf is much the best of them, I think), but this one - by veteran French director Claude Lelouch (his 1971 crime thriller Le Voyou is an underrated masterpiece) - rather got under my skin. And I thought it particularly appropriate to share it with my current Film classes a few weeks ago because we are focusing on the use of sound in film-making, and Lelouch here rather challengingly presents us with the aural point-of-view of a protagonist who is deaf-mute (and hence is able to remain in ignorance of the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, although it is happening just a few blocks from her apartment).

Unfortunately, this version has been pulled from YouTube at the moment. I think this film's copyright is not very vigorously defended online, so it will probably reappear at some point. For now, all I can find is this Italian version (most of the dialogue is rendered in sign language, and the general meaning is clear enough, even if you can't understand the subtitles.)

Thought for the week

"The most important learning is usually unconscious, unrecognised. You can't tell me today what you learned today; maybe in five or ten years you can."

More fun with Foley

By happy coincidence, a friend of mine in Beijing sent me this link a few weeks ago - quite unaware that I was teaching a course on 'Sound in Film' at the moment.

Evidently this 'musicless video' idea has become quite a fad on Youtube in the last couple of years, but I hadn't come across it before. This is a particularly imaginative one, recreating what might have been the 'live sound' during the shoot for the famous video of Mick Jagger and David Bowie covering Dancing in the Street for LiveAid.

This provides one possibility for the final assessment project for my students on this course unit (although I think most of them will choose a more straightforward piece of dramatic action to re-record the soundtrack for, such as this). [The original video can be seen here.]

This version of OK Go's award-winning treadmill routine for their song Here It Goes Again is perhaps even better (or maybe it's just that I've always loved the original video!).

Both of these soundtracks were created by Youtuber Mario Wienerroither.

Thought for the week

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."

Getting creative with sound

Movie sound designers most enjoy the challenge of creating 'design effects' - sound effects for things that don't actually exist in the real world (futuristic technology, etc.), or things that are real but can't readily be recorded (volcanoes, nuclear explosions, etc.).

WatchMojo's 'Top 10 Movie Sound Effects' here are mostly such 'design effects' from sci-fi films, but.... the list culminates with a vocal effect created by an actor (and used in dozens of movies over the years), probably the most famous sound effect in cinema history: The Wilhelm Scream.

Movie sound is not always realistic

Here's another fun roundup of common film sound effects that I've used with my Film classes sometimes. With many of these it's not obvious what the 'unrealistic' aspect is. Not all snakes are rattlesnakes, and rattlesnakes don't rattle all the time - especially not when they're stalking prey. It's a real noise that's often used in an unrealistic way. Similarly, keyboard 'clack' is real, but - other than with a really old keyboard! - it's usually too quiet to hear at any distance; in the movies it is usually greatly amplified, to focus attention on the person at the keyboard... and on wondering about what they are writing. Car tires squeal, but not quite as much or as often as they do in movie car chases (and you can find out how they make that noise here; it's not usually recorded live from the cars). Real-life screams mostly don't quite sound like movie screams. And so on...

The movies have evolved a number of conventions for how they portray various sounds: many are somewhat exaggerated, a few are actually quite unrealistic. But we are so used to this now that the real sound wouldn't sound 'right' to us in a movie - it wouldn't sound real!

Thought for the week

"The critic's job is to educate the public. The artist's job is to educate the critic."

Glad it's all over! (But it went remarkably WELL!!)

Last week's ENORMOUS logistical challenge of inviting the entire Greentown Primary school to visit our school during the course of the morning (only one year group at a time, at least; although that almost made things even more demanding, as we often had columns of hundreds of little kids trudging past each other in opposite directions - in the pouring rain) passed off far better than any of us could have hoped. I think we only had one emotional tantrum, one very minor injury, and - as far as I was aware - NO-ONE got lost at all.... which is little short of a miracle.

My most cherished observation on the day came from one of the accompanying Chinese primary teachers, who I am told commented ruefully to his American colleague, Tom Frost, "Oh, this is very bad - for me. The kids are loving this so much, they'll find my lessons very boring from now on."

That's a major commendation for these first teaching efforts by our students, who were really flung into the deep end with this, given very little time to prepare or practise.

I was very impressed by most of what I saw going on in these lessons: as I said at the farewell debrief last Friday evening, I enjoyed witnessing so much energy, so much creativity, and so much love being put into the teaching. And everybody seemed to be having a ton of FUN.

Some of my colleagues, I know, hope that our students might become a bit more appreciative of their efforts in the classroom now, a bit more aware of what a demanding job teaching can be. But for me, I think the major benefit of this activity has been as a bonding exercise for our new intake early in the year. Well, that and the possibility that this may have been a successful bridge-building exercise with our Chinese partner school, paving the way for more, and easier and closer inter-school collaborations through the rest of this year. We shall see.

Despite the onerous responsibility of being in overall charge of the event, I did somehow find the time to take plenty of photographs.... and I couldn't resist turning them into a slideshow. (It's a bit long, I'm afraid. But it has some very jolly music accompanying - an old favourite of mine, DJ Dain's inspired mash-up of I'm Yours by Jason Mraz, Don't Worry, Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin, and What A Wonderful World by the great Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.)

Stepping out in style

During our "I am a country" inter-disciplinary experience last week, students each drew a country by lot and were then asked to spend the whole week imagining the viewpoint of that country and its people in a variety of situations and activities. Both subject teachers and coach mentors initiated a number of learning inquiries inspired by this premise.

In Film class, students were challenged to find the most interesting short film clip that was representative of their allotted country. Sherson Ng had initially been disappointed to draw the small and unregarded Republic of Congo... but then his researches turned up this delightful mini-documentary on the 'Sapeurs' of Brazzaville.

Cross-posted from my school's video blog, CIS Hangzhou TV.

Thought for the week

"Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life."

John Williams is the man

Oh dear! As I started discussing the importance of the various elements that go into a movie soundtrack, some of the students in my Film class displayed a shocking lack of familiarity with the name of John Williams - the pre-eminent soundtrack composer of the last 40-odd years.

What better way to introduce them than this, a celebration of his music for the Star Wars series, arranged and performed by Moosebutter, a comedy acappella group from Salt Lake City (although this video was created - with Moosebutter's agreement, evidently - by popular Youtuber/zestful lip-syncher Corey Vidal)?!

Thought for the week

"Ability determines what you are capable of doing. Motivation determines what you choose to do. Attitude determines how well you do it."

A grammar lesson!

Dear, oh dear, my new English class have been through a whole week with me without tasting any 'rigour' yet! So, I felt obliged to round off Saturday's lesson with this lightning quick survey of some of the most common linguistic solecisms plaguing us today - courtesy of the great 'Weird Al' Yankovic.

I have adored Al since my teenage years. In fact, I think he first came to my attention with this brilliant comic riff on Michael Jackson's Beat It (essential viewing/listening!!).