It's a standard element of the action movie. The square-jawed, all-American team of soldiers are creeping up on the nasty Arabic/Vietnamese/Russian/German (delete as applicable) mercenaries/terrorists, moving through the landscape in absolute silence. Apart from when they exchange patriotic encouragements, of course. Once they're in position, they ready themselves and prepare to fill the screen with some good old-fashioned explosions.
But wait! How can they know when to attack? They're silent and invisible, after all, so they can't exactly shout to each other. Well, this is where the famous Soldier's Bird Call comes in. Performed by cupping your hands around your mouth and bellowing "too-WEE!", this call that sounds absolutely nothing like any bird I have ever heard in my life is nevertheless capable of carrying vast amounts of information in a perfectly innocuous fashion. Within minutes, hapless goons are being gunned down to the sound of stirring music, and the world is close to being safe again.
The Soldier's Bird Call may be effective in the jungle - after all, there may well be birds in the jungle that do sound like that. However, it just isn't practical in pretty much any other situation. Consider urban combat. The only birds you're likely to see in a major city are sparrows and starlings, and they tend to just burble and twitter away instead of making any appropriate signal noises. Or how about when our heroes are infiltrating a bunker complex, probably through the air ducts? Any bird noises would trigger a hail of bullets from even the stupidest of evil overlords.
This problem can be solved remarkably easily, however. There's no reason why birds should be the default option for signal noises - humans aren't even very good at producing them. My unrealistic life ambition, therefore, is to create a successful movie in which people signal covertly to each other by simply imitating sounds appropriate to the environment. One day, we will see films in which the Marines landing on a quiet shore carefully imitate the sound of a coconut falling to the ground. One day, the agents infiltrating the base will simply shout "EVERYTHING IS FINE, NO NEED TO PANIC" in Russian when the bombs should be detonated. And one day, the policeman sneaking up on the house with the hostage taker inside will produce a perfect rendition of a washing machine with a handful of change in the pocket of someone's jeans. Surely we can bring that day closer.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Unrealistic Life Ambitions #3: Appropriate Audio Camouflage
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Unrealistic Life Ambitions, #2: Dadaist Song Titles
(Ooh, a repeating blog feature that has actually repeated. That was unexpected.)
If you watch any TV at all, you can't have failed to notice the adverts for new albums that are sometimes produced. Generally voiced by Mark Goodier (in the UK, at least), all of these adverts follow much the same formula: the voiceover lists the names of the standout tracks that are going to make you want to buy the album, accompanied by either a) clips of the band in concert, b) parts of their music videos, or c) abstract bits of artwork.
Even if the artwork option is chosen, the audio will be part of the track that's just been named. And here's the key part: the clip used will always be at the point where the lead singer bellows out the name of the song. If the album in question was a collection of Bruce Springsteen's hits, for instance, part of the voiceover might go like this...
Voiceover: Featuring "The River", "Murder Incorporated, and the smash hit "Born to Run".
Bruce Springsteen (in concert): 'Cos tramps like us, baby we were booooorn to ruuuuuuuun!
There's nothing wrong with this, as such - it's just a bit dull, that's all. Clearly, there's a consensus among advertisers that this is the only possible way to advertise an album, so even if the visuals are really interesting, the audio will be completely predictable.
I say it's time this was stopped. And I know how to do it, too. My unrealistic life ambition is to start a successful rock band - so successful that we can eventually get Mark Goodier to do the voiceover for our TV adverts - without ever mentioning the title of any of our songs anywhere in the lyrics.
Overly ambitious, you say? Not at all! If countless bands can produce tracks whose lyrics consist of nothing but the song's title (taken from answers.com because the people without a sense of humour at Wikipedia had the terribly bad taste to delete the article), and if the Flaming Lips can produce songs like "The Wizard Turns On...The Giant Silver Flashlight And Puts On His Werewolf Moccasins", then how hard can it be? You can expect to hear our tender rock ballad "Seamus Heaney Recites The First Three Thousand And Twenty Digits of Pi" any day now.
Friday, 5 October 2007
Unrealistic Life Ambitions #1: Truth In Cinema
Looking at this blog's traffic stats, it would appear that quite a few of my visitors are getting here by searching for the phrase "unrealistic ambitions", or something similar. This gets them to this post from a few months back, which actually has absolutely nothing to do with ambitions, unrealistic or otherwise. Worse, the post title shows up on Google, suggesting that I actually did come up with 153 unrealistic ambitions. This, I imagine, would lead to some disappointment on the part of visitors who really wanted to know about my thwarted intentions for my life.
Well. This is one problem that I will be able to resolve right now, as I introduce Unrealistic Life Ambitions, my new occasional series. (When I say "occasional", I'm not kidding - don't expect these to turn up with any more regularity than Uncle Phil Making Arithmetic Fun.) There are many things that I'd like to do at some point in my life. Some of these are reasonably achievable (getting a job, eternal happiness, and so on), whereas others are verging on the impossible. It's that "verging" that is just keeping them from the realm of "castles in the air".
The first Ambition is one that I've had ever since I first bought a "Medium" size tub of popcorn at the cinema. "Medium", for those who don't know, is the only accurate sizing term that cinema popcorn salesmen use, and that's only because it's a completely relative term. Their "small" tubs are large enough for most of your lower arm, and the "large" ones...well, I suspect that they had a grain bushel somewhere in their ancestry. They really do contain more popcorn than anyone could reasonably be expected to eat - I'm confidently expecting the first "I got fat because the salesman offered to super size me" lawsuit to hit Odeon any day now.
And yet, these sizes are a little disappointing. The whole point of going to the cinema is to escape your actual life and swap it for that of the actors on the screen. Or for that of the enormous killer robots blowing things up. Either's good. And in that case, you don't want any part of the experience to be remotely normal. You want the most surreal experience that you can get, so that you're as disconnected from your real life as possible. How is it going to be satisfying for customers to enter these cavernous, loud, dark rooms, to see entirely unbelievable things happen on the giant screen in front of them, and then to be brought back to earth with the realisation that the tub of corn-derived polystyrene in front of them is of a size that, with a little effort, they could have put together at home?
Well, no more. My unrealistic life ambition to solve this problem is simple: acquire a cinema chain for the sole purpose of serving the "large" size of popcorn in oil drums. When the customers can take up temporary residence inside their snack servings, we will know that we have finally restored the requisite level of surreality to the movie-going experience.
