Is Peace on Earth the Demise of Film?

(by Rishi Thaker)

And now the month of March comes to a close and we’re another step closer to completing Slaughter, releasing Slaughter, getting to Cannes, going Stickmen Pictures wild there, and ultimately getting – in the words of the genius Mr Reznor – ‘closer to God’.

Chris White (Piggyback Studios)

This week I have been to Baldy ‘Soundman’ Chris’s abode twice where he and Dan have been foleying the new Brothers scene (as well as completing some great additional work on a revisited Professor Black scene). It’s coming along beautifully and we’re still on course for an April close for this project. For those of you who do not know what foleying is, well it’s basically coming up with and layering sound effects that we didn’t capture during the shoot e.g. explosions, gun shots etc… Most multi-million budget productions tend to do pretty much all their sound in post production nowadays (including ADR where actors, especially in wide shots, are pretty much dubbed by themselves in a sound studio – if you don’t believe me pay more attention to wide shots in films and more often than not characters in the scenes will have their mouths hidden from view or the dialogue may be just off synch). However, we have to capture as much on location as possible due to our smaller capacity.

In terms of thoughts for this week, I have been thinking about ‘Peace on Earth’. I’m guessing most of us have heard this phrase and every time something violent or destructive occurs in this world which catches our attention we may possibly yearn a little bit for the fulfilment of that phrase? I tried projecting in my head an extreme scenario as to what that would look like and this is where I got to:

People would love and respect everyone. Everyone would be forgiven for whatever was felt they needed forgiving for. There would be no conflict and no one would hate each other. There would be no boarders, no barriers, no taxes, no need for economy, no finance, no law and no need to ‘feed the war cannibal animal’. Everyone would live in harmony. There would be no sport (everyone’s a winner), no killing (we must all eat vegetables), no drugs (too unpredictable and a threat to global security under the ‘Peace for All’ act) and no controversy.

I realise that I am pushing to some odd extremity here but there is something strange about yearning for peace when what makes us human seems to defy it. I was left thinking that if we got to ‘Peace on Earth’ would we need movies? Or even Art in general? Movies have captured and generated every type of emotion and explored the rights and wrongs of human existence. This has in turn caused enjoyment, reflection and change. If we plateau at Peace, will we need movies (or art)? I don’t know and I guess there is a can of a billion 200ft pythons we can open here but I ended up getting to the conclusion that I hope we do get peace on earth eventually which begins from the day I die.  

  

Rishi