Marrying Kate Bush's magnum opus with the Nativity seemed such a simple idea I'm amazed I couldn't find anything else like it on YouTube (although it's probably there somewhere, hidden). The lyric deals, perhaps, more with a physical complication than the general suffering that Mary is forced to endure, but it still works. This particular production was aired on the BBC last winter (2010) and will almost certainly be repeated this Christmas - if you didn't see it then, it's well worth a look (even if I basically give away the ending here).
Added: 4 November 2011
There is nothing new under the sun, and the redubbing of Star Wars is no exception. Here, Darth Vader is re-imagined as Manchester's finest DCI - Life on Mars / Ashes To Ashes star Gene Hunt. This owes an awful lot to Snatch Wars (in which Vader was redubbed using Alan Ford), but has cleaner language. It's also less good, frankly, and there are still a couple of rough edges (mostly because of the sound discrepancy caused by the framerate), but it took me an entire summer and a week of 2 a.m. finishes and for that I think I will love it better than some of my other, slightly more polished productions. Make sure you stick around until after the end credits.
Added: 4 November 2011
When I was assembling the 'Cars' montage, I found an awful lot of good stuff that just didn't seem to fit. This became a sort of leftovers compilation that seemed to take on a life of its own, at least once I'd started scoring it to Joy Division's brooding masterpiece. There was some wonderful (and criminally unnoticed) cinematography in Ashes To Ashes - lots of delicately-placed camera angles and shadowy compositions that owed an awful lot to Blade Runner. Someone give that lighting director a BAFTA.
Why Gary Numan's magnum opus of alienation was never used in Ashes To Ashes is beyond me (we had to make do with the equally enthralling 'Are Friends Electric?' instead). Philip Glenister's immortal Gene Hunt seems to spend a lot of time behind the wheel of his Quattro, and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to capitalise on one of my favourite songs. This was mostly done in one evening. It was a late night, but completely worth it.
Emily discovered The Prisoner one afternoon last autumn. I got her the box set for Christmas and we both loved it. When you’re a parent your mind finds itself making all sorts of bizarre media connections if you allow it to. I can’t recall which of us actually had the idea of Number Six from The Prisoner being – well, Number Six from Numberjacks, but once it was there it was difficult to get shot of it. By sheer coincidence I managed to find footage of Six saying “Where am I?” or at least something very similar, which worked beautifully when overdubbing him with Patrick McGooghan. I showed this to a Prisoner-loving friend who pointed out that I made the fatal mistake of actually showing Number One, “who wasn’t even [SPOILER]”. Well, nobody’s perfect.
I was driving home one afternoon listening to Bat For Lashes when this song came on, and in my head I saw a flood of images from last year’s Doctor Who. A friend of mine asked recently just what sort of point I was trying to make with these montages, and the only reply I could think of was that they hopefully solicit an emotional response, at least when you can marry the right song to the right set of images. At any rate, the idea of Natasha Khan scoring Matt Smith’s first season in the Tardis seemed to just drop out of the sky, and when ideas drop out of the sky you have to scoop them up in a net before they recover their composure and hop away again. This didn’t come so naturally as the others, but I think the result was worth it.
UMG’s draconian copyright stance means that I can’t host this on YouTube, Facebook or any number of other video sites, but (for the moment) I have managed to post it on Ziddler. Unlike Dalek Zippy, which was done in advance of its featured star’s demise, this was concocted in something of a hurry in the week Andrew Gold died. It’s suitably ridiculous, as cheesy as a six-month-old cheddar and is a shameless piece of bandwagon jumping, but it hangs together. And it features Ardl O’Hanlon as an enormous cat.
Doctor Who – Thank You For Being A Friend
I’m really quite proud of this one. Destiny of the Daleks, if you haven’t seen it, is a second-rate (if amusing) adventure that’s not really worth bothering with, but it did give me a gem of an idea. There’s a bit on the Genesis of the Daleks extras DVD where Roy Skelton is being interviewed about the work he did voicing the Daleks, and is asked to quote classic lines from the show, which he does without the aid of the filter that gave his voice the distinctive robotic twang. De-filtered, he sounds exactly like Zippy, who of course he also voiced for many years in Rainbow, along with George. So I wondered how the Daleks would sound if they were voiced by Zippy, and it basically grew from there. A few weeks later, Skelton died, and overnight the hit count went up dramatically. (I almost feel guilty about that. Almost, but not quite.)
Thomas has this thing about Queen. Specifically, the song he entitles ‘Scaramouche’. We were quite big on the Muppets version for a while, but when one day (out of sheer boredom) I showed him the scene from Wayne’s World, he became hooked on that instead and requested it repeatedly. I was tired of constantly fishing out the DVD so I thought I might as well stick it on the hard drive. And then I thought I might as well cut my own version. Some of the lyrical associations are tenuous, and there's some dodgy syncing in the operatic section (which is down to the frames-per-second of the DVD - something I could have fixed if I'd known how at the time) but it hangs together, just about.
The first of the montages. I took footage from David Tennant’s substantial run on Doctor Who and scored it to Porcupine Tree’s overblown, grandiose rock anthem. Tennant does a lot of brooding and it just seemed to fit the music somehow. What’s really irritating about this is that the (perfectly encoded) audio was corrupted in the upload process by YouTube, which means that there’s an audible click on the bottom register. I’ve not yet been able to fix it, so right now it’s flawed, but still watchable.
The trailer mashup phenomenon began with ‘Shining’ (do have a look if you’ve not seen it, it’s hysterical) and exploded from there. The concept, for the benefit of the uninitiated: take an established genre film and re-cut it to produce a trailer that looks like it’s advertising something else entirely. So West Side Story is re-imagined as a zombie horror flick, Back To The Future becomes a gay love story, and in this case, Monty Python and the Holy Grail becomes – right down to the use of 'O Fortuna' – a serious medieval epic in the manner of Excalibur (which it always looked like it was parodying, despite preceding it by six years). This was by no means a new idea – there are various other Holy Grail mashups like this on YouTube – but I managed to put my own spin on this version.
Desperate for something to take his mind off his institutionalised, Alzheimer’s-ridden wife, academic John Hurt takes a seaside vacation, with unpleasantly spooky consequences. The 2010 adaptation, much like the original, left the specifics behind his haunting largely unexplained, or at the very least ambiguous. Here’s what we think might have been going on.