Archive for the ‘Thoughts on the Creative Process’ Category
Driving the Plot Forward
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
In the world of musical theater, it’s often stated that songs have to move the plot forward - something has to happen in the song. That is, if you left out the song, the play should have big holes in it that confuse people. I’m not so sure this is right. Or, at least, it often misses the real problem.
I suspect that the main problem this trope is trying to solve is a feeling that we’ve all had: during a show, you find yourself pretty caught up in the story, but then the music starts, a character turns to the audience, and you groan and sink back in your chair, prepared to wait out the oncoming boredom so you can get back to the plot. I know I’ve felt it - among other times, at a local performance of Into the Woods. I didn’t like the feeling much, so I appreciate the efforts of musical theater folks to minimize it.
However, I don’t think that tying songs to the plot more strongly really gets at the problem. I mean, think about the evidence.
1) People - even young people inclined to vast quantities of boredom - will sit through hours of music at a concert without the slightest thread of story or dramatic tension.
2) Several successful musicals feature songs that don’t forward the plot at all. Sometimes these are the best songs (”All That Jazz” and “Nowadays” from Chicago, “Ladies Who Lunch” from Company, many of the numbers from Cabaret, “Chim Chimeree,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “Step in Time,” and others from Mary Poppins, “Circle of Life” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from Lion King, the entire score to Spring Awakening, etc etc etc)
3) Some musicals have “plots” but no one actually cares, as the songs and dances are enough to keep everyone entertained throughout - Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Cats.
4) Some songs from musicals technically “do something” plot-wise, but they don’t really have to. Consider “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. The song does do some character development for Tevye, but the play is not really “about” Tevye’s quest to get rich. Our interest in the song is not really related to its role in the plot. Likewise, a number of the great Disney songs, like “Be Our Guest” and “Under the Sea,” do advance the story in an emotional way, but in a very simple way that could just as easily be conveyed with a sentence or two - “Welcome to the castle!” or “Look at how good you’ve got it!”
All these things suggest to me that the principal source of that “not another song” feeling isn’t the song’s relationship to the plot - it’s that the music itself is boring or not worth listening to. Good songs can happily insert themselves into a show without slowing things down, if done properly - the song “Little Bird” from Man of La Mancha is a pretty song that doesn’t need to fit into the plot until it’s almost over. It can just be a pretty song strummed by a guy with a guitar for the first verse or so. Of course, the best scenario is when music and story enhance each other in a beautiful synthesis - but if the story has to carry the music all the time, something’s wrong.
I think that this tendency to overemphasize plotline in musicals has led to problems with new shows. If you head over to nymf.org and listen to the samples for the new shows the festival is showcasing, you’ll often hear a lot of songs that sound the same - like someone took a wordy passage of dialog, rewrote it with some measure of rhyme and meter, added some uninteresting piano noodling underneath it, and called it a book song. Not that there aren’t some good songs to be heard, or that the songs on display are necessarily bad. But they don’t really work for me as music. I’m not even slightly tempted to download the mp3 to listen to on my iPod. I can’t imagine ever buying the cast album. Perhaps they’re clever or emotionally satisfying in the context of the show, but I’d like a little more out of my show music.
It seems like a lot of the people now producing new musicals aren’t really “music” people. What I mean by this is not that they’re not talented musicians - I’m sure I don’t hold a candle to most of them in terms of composition knowledge - it’s that their focus is more on theater than on music. At least, that’s how it comes across from their work. Theater-focused songs tend to be on the characters and on the dialog and on attempts to be clever or dramatic, often at the expense of satisfying song structure, strong melody, or powerful harmonies. The music is not really used to its emotionally fullest extent. It’s a light color wash added to witty or thoughtful (but often extraordinarily wordy and meandering) text.
To contrast, music-focused songs can sound like they were made for an album, perhaps even to the detriment of theatrical plausibility. They’re not afraid to employ melismas (multiple notes sung for one syllable, as in “I-ee-I-ee-I-ee-I will always lo-ove yoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,” etc.), use scat singing or non-words like “ahh” and “ooh,” or even have extended portions of music without words at all. These things don’t necessarily mean that the music is good, but they do mean that the music had a focus in the writer’s mind, so the odds are better. Sometimes a show like this still crops up, but they’re fewer and farther between. Also, their plots are often tragically less compelling.
Nonetheless, most of the best musical theater songs of the last few decades have come out of the pop music world (or composers with pop music ambitions), rather than the theater music world (Sondheim and Kander/Ebb being some notable exceptions). Consider Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who, being all British and such, started out with pretensions to Beatle-dom. Joseph, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita are all three more albums than they are shows. Or consider Stephen Schwartz, who worked popular music into his shows and even now puts out albums of original music without a show context. And now, dominating Broadway, you have folks directly from the popular music world - Elton John, Duncan Sheik, Phil Collins, even Dolly Parton.
Not that all the stuff these folks produce is great and wonderful (I’m not so much an Elton John fan) - but it’s often better than what we get from folks out of the theater tradition, who seem to be both clinging to song styles that have long since lost their luster and reaching for some nebulous novelty that no one’s really grasped yet.
Somehow, the world of musical theater and popular music need to come together and draw on each other in a more productive fashion. Any ideas?
Is Katya Too Passive?
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
It has been brought to my attention that Katya may be more compelling if she took a more active role in the story that Tell Me a Beautiful Lie tells - as it is, she pretty much reacts to forces and characters around her - Roman and Oleksander, the Russian Civil War, her aunt, etc.
On the one hand, I don’t see her as being completely passive - she is actively involved in making decisions and interpreting what’s around her. She doesn’t simply float along from thing to thing. She’s clearly thoughtful and intelligent. But is that enough? The only decisions that she makes - gradually allow Oleksander into her life, stay in Sevastopol, fire the gun - may not be played as things that she chooses so much as things that she has to do. (Of course, Katya’s personality, as are many of our own, is the type that would rather devolve responsibility by pretending she has to. Too much subtlety?)
And then, to compound defensiveness, I’m wondering whether an active protagonist even matters. The biggest, most successful musicals don’t necessarily have them. 1776 and My Fair Lady certainly tell great stories of a powerful personality on a quest for achievement - John Adams wants independence for America, Henry Higgins wants to pass off Eliza as a lady. But what about Fiddler on the Roof, Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, and Wicked?
In Fiddler, Tevye, as the protagonist, doesn’t do much other than gradually bend to the forces that threaten his traditions and worldview, until he can bend no further. He clings to what he can, and reconciles with what he has to, so he’s not strictly passive, but he’s not on a quest either - his personal actions don’t drive the story. His daughters and the Russian army do. And yet, it’s an awesome story and one of my favorite musicals.
In Les Mis, Jean Valjean has pretty much achieved sainthood 15 minutes into the first act, and has no more character development to do. He has no quest larger than to live his saintly life in peace. Javert drives the action by zealously pursuing him, and the revolutionary students drive the action by starting a war in the streets. I’m sure there are people who view the story primarily through the lens of Enjolras and the other students, and so see it as a quest story. But others, I suspect, see it principally as a beautiful story of forgiveness through the lens of Valjean, or a tragic love story through the lens of Eponine - even though neither Valjean nor Eponine really drive the story by their actions.
In Phantom, Christine Daae is largely passive as well. The Phantom is the one on the quest, such as it is, and Christine only wants to be left alone. The force of the story comes from the Phantom as villain.
In Wicked, there’s an idea that Elphaba is on a quest, but that never once emotionally drives the story - will she meet the Wizard, like she dreams about in her first song? Will she triumph over the Wizard after his disillusionment at the end of Act I? Wicked has elements of a quest story, but the plot seems mostly uninterested in it - we never see Elphaba working hard to win the Wizard’s affection, we never get a good idea of how awful the Wizard is or an idea of what exactly Elphaba’s plan to beat him is and how she would accomplish it. Mostly, the story is about the love triangle and friendship between her and Glinda. She doesn’t really “do” anything to drive the story until her decision to flee at the end of Act I, at which point, the Wizard is more the one on the quest - to find her, use her as a convenient bad guy, etc etc.
Perhaps the larger point is that emotionally engaging stories don’t necessarily follow an easily-discernable plot arc covering an easily-expressed character change. Life is often more confusing and muddled, and I think people have the capacity to follow stories that aren’t simple and digestible, even if most people couldn’t articulate why a story moves them exactly. It’s more important to be emotionally honest, to have sympathetic, believable characters, and a plot that engenders suspense in some way. At least, that’s where I currently stand on the issue.
Perhaps you disagree?
Eddie Sotto on Imagineering
Friday, May 15th, 2009
The ImagineeringDisney blog has an interesting post by a former Imagineer named Eddie Sotto on what he would do with the current Disney parks. Most of what he says resonates with me pretty well, but then he comes to how he would revamp Epcot - make the World Showcase pavilions more authentic (Japan would have the neon of Ginza as well as the serenity of Kyoto, etc), make the Future World pavilions be more “legit,” demonstrate by example rather than preach, etc.
This kind of thinking turns my stomach a little - it satisfies the superego rather than the id, so to speak, and that’s not why people go to theme parks. The first and foremost job of a theme park, it seems to me, is the same as that of a video game or a musical or any other number of creative projects - to make an emotional connection with people. Authenticity and political correctness are joyless values - something else entirely.
Next to Normal Creative Team
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Over on Broadway.com, you can watch a fascinating video interview with the composer and lyricist of an upcoming Broadway musical called Next to Normal, about a woman with various psychological issues undergoing increasingly extreme forms of therapy.
I always find it interesting to get an insight into the creation of things like this, but primarily what fascinates me is how, in this case, they occasionally write lyrics first, and occasionally music first - and either way, it all comes out sounding pretty much the same - a style I’m not a fan of at all. It feels bland and predictable to me. I’m not sure what it is about this kind of music that leads people to either write it or listen to it. I honestly don’t understand.
But whatever it is, it’s not the fault of a songwriting team putting too much emphasis on lyrics, since those songs written music-first sound the same. So, I’m left with the unsettling conclusion that there must be lots of people out there who like this kind of music. The composers themselves must like it. It weirds me out.
That’s fine, I guess. I’ve long accepted that I have strange tastes in entertainment (not sophisticated, necessarily, just weird). I hope that it doesn’t mean that the music I create isn’t appealing to people in the way that it’s appealing to me.
Mortal Kombat vs Tekken
Sunday, December 14th, 2008
On the off chance that some video game developer is browsing the web for clues as to how to make the next great game series, I’ve got a helpful idea.
Back in the 90s, fighting games were big in the arcade. Street Fighter II made the first big splash, followed by the Mortal Kombat series, and then eventually moving into 3D fighters like Virtua Fighter and Tekken. Personally, I greatly enjoyed Street Fighter II, and fell in love with Mortal Kombat - but for some reason I found myself frustrated and uninterested in the 3D fighters. Sure, graphically they were a step forward - 3D models, lots of realistic-looking fighting styles, numerous characters. But they were missing something.
I think most importantly what they were missing was crisp play control. I like the word “crisp” in describing games with excellent play control - what you want is a game that is immediately responsive to your button presses, logical and intuitive. Think about satisfying user interfaces on your PC. When you push a button, it should go “click” and look like it’s being pressed. When you’re waiting for something to happen, you want a little hourglass or watch to show up and indicate that the computer is “thinking” so you don’t sit around wondering what’s going on.
Tekken felt like the opposite of crisp. Pushing buttons either executed a move or didn’t. A move either actually struck your opponent or it didn’t, and there was not an immediately accessible logic about it. If an opponent was reeling or falling down from your last attack, then your fists might just sail through the opponent’s body without doing anything. You successfully execute a combo but your opponent moves, so you’re left flailing into an empty corner while you wait for the move to complete. It was not terribly satisfying.
Mortal Kombat on the other hand, had a complete logic to it. If you hit an opponent, even if that opponent was falling, you scored a blow. You never missed for no reason, or found yourself frustrated in your inability to make your character do what you want. Crouching always went under projectiles, jumping always took you over them. Basic punches and kicks were more rapid fire.
This is maybe why Star Wars: Force Unleashed for the Wii was ultimately not satisfying for me. You spent a lot of time flailing your lightsaber and throwing people around, but often too many things were happening at once, and it was sometimes unclear that your powers actually did anything, and getting your character to do what you want was not always easy or intuitive.
So something to think about while making RiftMaker I guess.
Lessons From Adventures of Kyle
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
Last night I randomly started playing one of my really old Games Factory creations - the Adventures of Kyle, a weird hybrid of Diablo and Zelda. I spent a lot of effort on this game, but the results aren’t all that entertaining, so I thought I would record “lessons learned” so to speak - things not to try again, not counting the inadvisability of writing a game based entirely on the personalities of your own group of friends.
1. Isometric view is not drawn at a 45 degree angle.
One of the more frustating elements of this game visually is the wacky perspective. Isometric is the perspective used by Diablo, Starcraft, and Mario RPG to simulate a 3D perspective entirely in two dimensions. It occasionally looks wacky as objects do not diminish in size as they get farther away, but this wackiness could be hidden or reduced with appropriate graphics tricks. Needless to say, I did not use any of them in Adventures of Kyle, in which I also drew everything at a 45 degree angle - more effort then drawing things head on, while at the same time appearing highly distorted and amateurish. The actual angle is something else that I’m too lazy to look up right now.
2. Games aren’t fun when you can’t kill a single enemy without getting hurt.
This may be less true of RPGs where combat is abstracted and healing mechanisms are plentiful and expected, but for games with any action component, there’s really nothing more frustrating than finding that no amount of skill can save you from getting hit by a monster at least once. Stocking up on health potions merely to survive long enough to beat the next level is un-fun. Having the option of potions to help mitigate an avoidable disaster is fun. Good enemy design, therefore, means no random, jerky enemy movements, no unblockable or undodgable projectiles, and no enemies that chase you inexorably that can kill you instantly.
3. Challenge should not derive from poor play control.
One of the decisions I made early on with Adventures of Kyle was that I would imitate the mouse-driven control style of Diablo. I also thought, evidently, it would be a good idea to extend that control with a variety of obscure keyboard commands. Mouse driven control requires a lot of finagling to get right. Although a simple left mouse click tells Kyle where to walk to, he has no pathfinding capabilities whatsoever. Many of the enemies move too fast to right-click (indicating a desire to attack), and the range of Kyle’s sword swing is so low that you have to be practically hugging the enemy to get a hit in. Naturally, all this is overcome-able with some ingenuity and practice, but who WANTS to? The more satisfying video games give you a significant element of responsiveness and control - the challenges are external, not internal. Zelda aficionados know that it can be great fun to mow grass in “Link to the Past” - the grass is no challenge, but it represents a crisp exertion of power in the video game world. Games can’t be too easy, of course, but no one minds levels that start simply or build in challenge. Super Mario Galaxy had an excellent challenge curve. The challenge should not be in just walking around.
4. You really ought to be able to walk behind trees.
Of course, at this point in my Games Factory career (9th grade, maybe?), I didn’t have the slightest idea how to create objects that you could go both in front of and behind. Legends of Kyle had me trying to be a little too clever by shifting trees around the Z-axis (depth level) slowly but visibly during gameplay. By later games (never finished and probably lost to a disabled hard drive), I had found plug-ins for Multimedia Fusion that did the trick, but simply punting on the issue and forcing Kyle to walk all the way around the tops of trees as though they were flat instead of standing up was just bizarre. Some more clever level design might have corrected the problem. Maybe the lesson here is, if there’s something important you can’t do, redesign the game so no one notices!
5. Make the game accessible to people who don’t know you and your friends.
Although the point of a lot of these games that I made WAS to build fantasy worlds for and involving people I knew, there are likely ways to mitigate that that I wasn’t really interested in doing. Jokes instead of in-jokes, ample introductory material to present folks to people who don’t know them, etc. etc. I’m sure that there are limits even then, but I figure they ought to TRY to be broached, rather than simply run away from.