{"id":11371,"date":"2013-11-19T12:32:22","date_gmt":"2013-11-19T20:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/?p=11371"},"modified":"2014-01-20T11:53:08","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T19:53:08","slug":"creativity-conventions-and-music-in-noah-and-its-trailers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2013\/11\/creativity-conventions-and-music-in-noah-and-its-trailers.html","title":{"rendered":"Creativity, conventions, and music in Noah<\/i> and its trailers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>Ever since he burst onto the scene with his first feature film, the trippy low-budget math-and-mysticism movie Pi<\/a><\/i> (1998), Darren Aronofsky has established himself as a director with a unique set of interests, and as a director who tends to push his visuals and his stories well, well beyond the limits of conventional filmmaking. Paramount Pictures, meanwhile, is a major studio that is in the business of keeping things as safe and conventional as possible, so as to attract the widest audience possible (just look at what they did to Star Trek<\/i><\/a>).<\/p>\n

So it came as no surprise that, long after Aronofsky teamed up with Paramount to make his first big-budget studio movie, the Bible epic Noah<\/a><\/i>, rumours began to circulate that there was tension between the two of them<\/a> over the final cut of the film. And it has been interesting to see how the studio\u2019s promotional campaign for Noah<\/i> has gone out of its way to make the film look as generic as possible, while adjusting its definition of \u201cgeneric\u201d to suit whichever audience a given trailer is intended for.<\/p>\n

I mentioned a few weeks back that the trailer shown to religious audiences<\/a> had gone so far as to put a praise-and-worship song<\/a> on the soundtrack, as if to make the film look as generically Christian as possible. Well, now that the trailer for mainstream audiences<\/a> is here, it turns out that this<\/i> trailer uses a track from an outfit called Audiomachine<\/a> to make the film look as generically epic as possible.<\/p>\n

Who are Audiomachine? The Playlist<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n

The music in the first trailer is Audiomachine\u2019s \u201cNew Beginning.\u201d If it sounds like very trailer-like music, that\u2019s because it is. Audiomachine are not a band so much and more of a boutique, motion picture advertising music production house, specializing in original music and sound design specifically engineered for the high end trailer market.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not surprisingly, the trailer has worried some fans of Aronofsky\u2019s, who fear that Noah<\/i> will have none of the director\u2019s singular style. Drew McWeeny<\/a>, who has championed Aronofsky\u2019s films in the past, wrote that the trailer \u201clooked no different than most of the noisy blockbuster fare of the last decade,\u201d and added:<\/p>\n

There are so many things that are in the script by Aronofsky and Ari Handel that aren\u2019t even hinted at in this trailer, and I get the feeling it\u2019s because they\u2019re still not quite sure how to explain the 18-foot-tall<\/a> six-armed Watcher beasts<\/a> or the way it turns into a family psychodrama while they\u2019re all on the Ark. Instead, they\u2019re selling spectacle, and the stuff with the generic Charging Crowd Exploding Battlefield footage and the Ark facing the turbulent CGI waters of \u201cThe Perfect Storm\u201d all feel like they came out of a stock footage catalog from event movies since the year 2000. That\u2019s the last thing I expected from a Darren Aronofsky trailer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As McWeeny notes, there is ample reason to believe the film will be much stranger than the trailer lets on \u2014 and in fact, there are already elements in the international trailer that look a little stranger than what the North American trailer gives us. (What\u2019s with that close-up of the two fingers almost touching, for example?)<\/p>\n

But, as one who listens to the soundtrack to The Fountain<\/i> (2006) fairly often \u2014 it is composed by Clint Mansell, who has worked on all of Aronofsky\u2019s films and has played a big part in defining their signature style \u2014 the question I<\/i> have been asking is how the actual score for Noah<\/i> will compare to the generic trailer music.<\/p>\n

Well, no clips have been released yet or anything, but over the weekend Aronofsky did send out a few<\/a> tweets<\/a> to the effect that he and Mansell were working on the score and \u201cfine tuning symphonic madness\u201d. And that gives me hope, at least. (Along the way, he also tweeted<\/a> the picture above \u2014 that\u2019s Mansell on the left, Aronofsky on the right, and an image of Russell Crowe as Noah on a screen in the middle.)<\/p>\n

As a footnote: It\u2019s kind of funny that people might worry now that a film directed by Aronofsky and scored by Mansell will turn out to be just another big-studio tentpole, all on the basis of a trailer that was designed to be as conventional as possible.<\/p>\n

Why is it funny? Because some of the ads for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers<\/a><\/i> (2002) \u2014 one of the films that played a big part in driving Hollywood in its current effects-heavy direction \u2014 used a theme that Mansell had written for Aronofsky\u2019s second (and stylistically quite daring) film Requiem for a Dream<\/a><\/i> (2000).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an irony in that, somewhere.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The trailers for Noah<\/i> have used music that was generically Christian or generically epic, depending on the intended audience. But what will the actual music in the film sound like?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1635,54,158,63,1644],"class_list":["post-11371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-clint-mansell","tag-darren-aronofsky","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-noah-2014","tag-requiem-for-a-dream"],"yoast_head":"\nCreativity, conventions, and music in Noah and its trailers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The trailers for Noah have used music that was generically Christian or generically epic, depending on the intended audience. 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