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silveradeptChallenge #9 asks us to try and explain a small part (or the whole part) of why we consumed a particular canon. Here's the extra text:
This challenge must be easier for the monofannish, in choosing what canon to highlight. What part, of course, can be a completely agonizing affair when you live everything about all of it, but it's a smaller amount of space to work with than the vast multitude available to the multifannish. I know I've talked about the way in which Person of Interest uses its visual effects to show not only perspective, but the system stability of The Machine as it has to deal with defending itself against attackers. And the melding of animation, singing, and mindfulness that Steven Universe used with "Here Comes A Thought." Some canons have showstopper moments they have been building to add part of an arc for a season, or the white show, and others are there to show progression over time, where there are a lot of little things that happen, but nothing becomes The Moment that the thing is remembered by. Glee, for example, has a lot of moments in it (characters uncloseting themselves, for example, or getting in vehicle accidents through distracted driving) but might be better known as a show where real life, in the form of the death of Cory Monteith, may have been the single most impactful moment on the show, regardless of what happened on camera. Sesame Street, to a certain generation, is the show that figured out a way to talk to preschoolers about death, while also teaching them letters and numbers and prosocial behavior. And we are just now really realizing how much of an impact Fred Rogers had by being a television neighbor (and outspoken advocate of television as a medium that could be used for good purposes) to so many children on a daily basis. (I thought we would have figured it out when Fred Rogers cut PSAs about the 11 September attacks. He had just finished the show, and then something big and scary happened, and who did we ask to help us through it? Mr. Rogers.) Long-running series like Star Trek and Doctor Who have fan favorite episodes, but the series themselves are important as cultural touchstones (and, occasionally, as innovators of techniques for the medium and for storytelling).
Many people can trace their fannish origins to specific shows - Star Trek, Harry Potter, and the MCU are very big ones (Stargate, too, I'm guessing, and Final Fantasy VII, all five of which have voluminous m/m slash archives.), but there are plenty of others. If you go the furry route, for a particular generation, Rescue Rangers (or Disney's Renard, err, Robin Hood) is mentioned a lot as a formative interest, and the Warner and Disney animation resurgence that follows sustains that interest.
The more I look at and intake audiovisual canons, the more I find myself paying attention to the sound design and soundtrack. (Doesn't work quite so well when you're reading a book or fic, but playlists and songfic exist) A good sound design can make things work seamlessly. And, for the most part, our media experiences are full of deliberate sound decisions meant to fill space or provide emphasis. For as much as "Mickey-mousing" was decried as cheap tricks, a significant amount of animation adopted it (and in so doing, exposed the cartoon-watching crowd to a wide variety of classical and instrumental works. Long before I ever saw The Ring, I knew what the Valkyries sounded like, because someone was using their spear and magic helmet for lagomorph assault.) We're so used to sound in our media experience that when someone makes a decision to be scientifically accurate (for dramatic purposes, mind you) and remind the audience that there's no sound in space, because there's no medium for it to travel through, the theaters screening the film have to post disclaimers outside that say "this film is not defective. At a climactic moment, there is no sound." It's also why I maintain the best episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, at least regarding sound design and decisions, is not "Once More With Feeling," the musical episode, but "Hush," the nearly-silent one. (Yes, I am also fond of John Cage's 4'33". An enterprising Yuletide gifter made a portable performance of the piece that can be deployed anywhere.)
The are other feats of sound design that appear when attention is drawn to them. For example, a seeming staple of video game speedruns are games done not just quick, but blindfolded. Removing the video aspect from a video game seems like it would make it difficult to play, but through audio cues and being able to predict or control the reaction of the game through specific inputs and their reactions (often requiring actual split-second timing) or knowing that a specific maneuver will move a character an exact distance consistently, an otherwise seemingly chaotic environment can be understood and then played in. It helps even more if the sound designers really put thought into how they wanted those sounds to pan and shift so that someone could, in theory, complete the game without being able to see. (Been done for Ocarina of Time, most impressively, but also games like the Punch-Out!! series.)
What I wanted to draw your attention to, however, as a piece of canon, is the Burly Brawl from the second of The Wachowskis' Matrix movies. Don Davis and Juno Reactor put together a soundtrack that follows the action of Neo ("The One", represented by the symphonic side, especially when performing Matrix feats) fighting an ever increasing horde of Agents Smith (represented by the frantic electronica side). Having watched the action just with the soundtrack, you can already see the way in which the see-saw of the soundtrack mirroring the action of the film, and how, even as the odds get ever increasingly against Neo, he is still able to hold his own.
Here's the first part, with dialogue and effects laid over top of the soundtrack, and then the second part where the numbers increase significantly more quickly. Already, there's a lot more sound involved just from the attacks, which is a pretty standard thing in movies.
A lot of foley involves recreating mundane things, like walking, revving an engine, or opening and closing doors, but it encompasses anything else that would generate sound and need to be clearer than what the microphones shooting the scene collected. Just about every form of violence has sound effects attached to it to make everything sound correct to the listener. (This is because actually hitting someone, as you see in amateur and professional videos of brawls and competitions, is relatively silent, even if it really, really hurts.) As the fight progresses, the regular sounds are interrupted by Bullet Time sequences that introduce themselves with a sound meant to evoke the slowing down of time (the conceit being that when Bullet Time is activated, the fight is actually progressing faster than the human eye can follow, and so it needs to be slowed down to the point where we can perceive the cool stuff going on) and a similar effect when the fight kicks back into real time.
Things really get weird in part two, with the Agent possessing an observer and then bring turned into a clone of Smith (the metallic, electronic screeching underneath that serves as a sign of the underlying computer systems that make up The Matrix at work), and then, in the climactic sequences, the sound of concrete crushing a Smith and the metallic sounds of a bar being used for grievous bodily harm to a significant number of the Smiths.
Also, did you notice the sound of a bowling ball striking pins in that sequence, right after the Smiths mobbed Neo and he threw them off? What's that doing in an action movie? Mostly, I think it's there as a reminder to the audience that scary they are witnessing is a simulation, and that Neo has the power to bend or break that simulation to his well, if he desires. So why not have a stock sound effect from cartoons (the ball hitting pins is usually involved in situations where characters are scattered like tenpins by another character acting as the ball, whether intentionally or not) right before the end of this sequence? That sound effect there plays on audience expectations of what they would hear in a serious martial arts film and what they would hear in a cartoon, creating a delicious juxtaposition that makes sense in both of its contexts individually, but causes a tone mismatch when put together. Call it a moment of folevity, if you like.
The recreation of the fight as a contest between one Mario and lots of Luigis gives you a completely different set of sound effects to work with, which changes the tone of the work considerably, even though the music and dialogue remain the same. (Also, stop the video at 8 minutes and 45 seconds, because the outro is a perpetually relevant example of toxic gamer culture and, to my knowledge, the video hasn't been uploaded without that tag on the end.)
There's a lot to look at in the Burly Brawl, absolutely, and if you are familiar with the conventions of wuxia films, this entire fight sequence likely makes a lot of visual sense. But without the sound (or with different sounds applied), the experience is very different, proving that sound and music design is extremely important to getting proper mood across.
Also, I like it and think it really representative of the fight sequences of The Matrix franchise in general.
As much as I'm often happy paddling my fandom-of-one canoe on my own, sharing my love and excitement and rants and hopes and general flailing about The Thing I Love is a big part of what draws me to fandom spaces. Admittedly, I've never been that good at talking people into fandoms, but that's never slowed me down when it comes to trying!A solid autocucumber joke, as well as an out to someone who wants to talk about naval hardware instead of pairings. (Or pistols, because several of them have been referred to as "hand cannons". Or siege warfare and the abrupt end of a heavily armored mounted class. At least until they finally morphed into a heavily mechanized mounted class.)
So which of the Things You Love would you like to tell people about? Why might others like it? If you're a fan of this other thing, would you be a fan of this? Why is it just the best and most terrible and beautiful canon in your heart right now?
[Challenge text]
This challenge is focused on original canons, but I personally hold a pretty loose definition of what that can mean, so if you think something is a "canon," it totally is. Alternately, promote your favourite "cannon." Preferably with pictures.
This challenge must be easier for the monofannish, in choosing what canon to highlight. What part, of course, can be a completely agonizing affair when you live everything about all of it, but it's a smaller amount of space to work with than the vast multitude available to the multifannish. I know I've talked about the way in which Person of Interest uses its visual effects to show not only perspective, but the system stability of The Machine as it has to deal with defending itself against attackers. And the melding of animation, singing, and mindfulness that Steven Universe used with "Here Comes A Thought." Some canons have showstopper moments they have been building to add part of an arc for a season, or the white show, and others are there to show progression over time, where there are a lot of little things that happen, but nothing becomes The Moment that the thing is remembered by. Glee, for example, has a lot of moments in it (characters uncloseting themselves, for example, or getting in vehicle accidents through distracted driving) but might be better known as a show where real life, in the form of the death of Cory Monteith, may have been the single most impactful moment on the show, regardless of what happened on camera. Sesame Street, to a certain generation, is the show that figured out a way to talk to preschoolers about death, while also teaching them letters and numbers and prosocial behavior. And we are just now really realizing how much of an impact Fred Rogers had by being a television neighbor (and outspoken advocate of television as a medium that could be used for good purposes) to so many children on a daily basis. (I thought we would have figured it out when Fred Rogers cut PSAs about the 11 September attacks. He had just finished the show, and then something big and scary happened, and who did we ask to help us through it? Mr. Rogers.) Long-running series like Star Trek and Doctor Who have fan favorite episodes, but the series themselves are important as cultural touchstones (and, occasionally, as innovators of techniques for the medium and for storytelling).
Many people can trace their fannish origins to specific shows - Star Trek, Harry Potter, and the MCU are very big ones (Stargate, too, I'm guessing, and Final Fantasy VII, all five of which have voluminous m/m slash archives.), but there are plenty of others. If you go the furry route, for a particular generation, Rescue Rangers (or Disney's Renard, err, Robin Hood) is mentioned a lot as a formative interest, and the Warner and Disney animation resurgence that follows sustains that interest.
The more I look at and intake audiovisual canons, the more I find myself paying attention to the sound design and soundtrack. (Doesn't work quite so well when you're reading a book or fic, but playlists and songfic exist) A good sound design can make things work seamlessly. And, for the most part, our media experiences are full of deliberate sound decisions meant to fill space or provide emphasis. For as much as "Mickey-mousing" was decried as cheap tricks, a significant amount of animation adopted it (and in so doing, exposed the cartoon-watching crowd to a wide variety of classical and instrumental works. Long before I ever saw The Ring, I knew what the Valkyries sounded like, because someone was using their spear and magic helmet for lagomorph assault.) We're so used to sound in our media experience that when someone makes a decision to be scientifically accurate (for dramatic purposes, mind you) and remind the audience that there's no sound in space, because there's no medium for it to travel through, the theaters screening the film have to post disclaimers outside that say "this film is not defective. At a climactic moment, there is no sound." It's also why I maintain the best episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, at least regarding sound design and decisions, is not "Once More With Feeling," the musical episode, but "Hush," the nearly-silent one. (Yes, I am also fond of John Cage's 4'33". An enterprising Yuletide gifter made a portable performance of the piece that can be deployed anywhere.)
The are other feats of sound design that appear when attention is drawn to them. For example, a seeming staple of video game speedruns are games done not just quick, but blindfolded. Removing the video aspect from a video game seems like it would make it difficult to play, but through audio cues and being able to predict or control the reaction of the game through specific inputs and their reactions (often requiring actual split-second timing) or knowing that a specific maneuver will move a character an exact distance consistently, an otherwise seemingly chaotic environment can be understood and then played in. It helps even more if the sound designers really put thought into how they wanted those sounds to pan and shift so that someone could, in theory, complete the game without being able to see. (Been done for Ocarina of Time, most impressively, but also games like the Punch-Out!! series.)
What I wanted to draw your attention to, however, as a piece of canon, is the Burly Brawl from the second of The Wachowskis' Matrix movies. Don Davis and Juno Reactor put together a soundtrack that follows the action of Neo ("The One", represented by the symphonic side, especially when performing Matrix feats) fighting an ever increasing horde of Agents Smith (represented by the frantic electronica side). Having watched the action just with the soundtrack, you can already see the way in which the see-saw of the soundtrack mirroring the action of the film, and how, even as the odds get ever increasingly against Neo, he is still able to hold his own.
Here's the first part, with dialogue and effects laid over top of the soundtrack, and then the second part where the numbers increase significantly more quickly. Already, there's a lot more sound involved just from the attacks, which is a pretty standard thing in movies.
A lot of foley involves recreating mundane things, like walking, revving an engine, or opening and closing doors, but it encompasses anything else that would generate sound and need to be clearer than what the microphones shooting the scene collected. Just about every form of violence has sound effects attached to it to make everything sound correct to the listener. (This is because actually hitting someone, as you see in amateur and professional videos of brawls and competitions, is relatively silent, even if it really, really hurts.) As the fight progresses, the regular sounds are interrupted by Bullet Time sequences that introduce themselves with a sound meant to evoke the slowing down of time (the conceit being that when Bullet Time is activated, the fight is actually progressing faster than the human eye can follow, and so it needs to be slowed down to the point where we can perceive the cool stuff going on) and a similar effect when the fight kicks back into real time.
Things really get weird in part two, with the Agent possessing an observer and then bring turned into a clone of Smith (the metallic, electronic screeching underneath that serves as a sign of the underlying computer systems that make up The Matrix at work), and then, in the climactic sequences, the sound of concrete crushing a Smith and the metallic sounds of a bar being used for grievous bodily harm to a significant number of the Smiths.
Also, did you notice the sound of a bowling ball striking pins in that sequence, right after the Smiths mobbed Neo and he threw them off? What's that doing in an action movie? Mostly, I think it's there as a reminder to the audience that scary they are witnessing is a simulation, and that Neo has the power to bend or break that simulation to his well, if he desires. So why not have a stock sound effect from cartoons (the ball hitting pins is usually involved in situations where characters are scattered like tenpins by another character acting as the ball, whether intentionally or not) right before the end of this sequence? That sound effect there plays on audience expectations of what they would hear in a serious martial arts film and what they would hear in a cartoon, creating a delicious juxtaposition that makes sense in both of its contexts individually, but causes a tone mismatch when put together. Call it a moment of folevity, if you like.
The recreation of the fight as a contest between one Mario and lots of Luigis gives you a completely different set of sound effects to work with, which changes the tone of the work considerably, even though the music and dialogue remain the same. (Also, stop the video at 8 minutes and 45 seconds, because the outro is a perpetually relevant example of toxic gamer culture and, to my knowledge, the video hasn't been uploaded without that tag on the end.)
There's a lot to look at in the Burly Brawl, absolutely, and if you are familiar with the conventions of wuxia films, this entire fight sequence likely makes a lot of visual sense. But without the sound (or with different sounds applied), the experience is very different, proving that sound and music design is extremely important to getting proper mood across.
Also, I like it and think it really representative of the fight sequences of The Matrix franchise in general.
