Category Archives: TV & Film

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On Storytelling: Film Composer Michael Giacchino

  By Karen Osborne August 3, 2015

“What are we going to call him? … Tiberius? You kidding me? No, that’s the worst.
Let’s name him after your father. Let’s name him Jim.”
— George Kirk

One of the coolest parts about being a fan of something is sharing the love with other people who feel the same way, whether it’s Star Trek, comics, NASCAR, stamp collecting, the lives of the saints or whatever floats your boat. Recently, I was able to attend the Star Trek Live event at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts just outside of Washington, D.C., with the National Symphony Orchestra playing the soundtrack to the 2009 Star Trek movie live for an audience of thousands.

CLXH_iKWIAAbyjYGiacchino is to the right, in the blue.

As an added treat, soundtrack composer Michael Giacchino, introduced the film and attended a Q-and-A session with an audience of over two hundred. Giacchino has been called “the new John Williams,” and it’s very easy to see why.

The composer’s year has been incredibly busy. He has been responsible for four big-screen blockbuster soundtracks just this year alone, and he’s only recently had his first break since. It’s always a lot of fun to hear creators talk about their creative processes, and whether you’re interested in writing, art, or music, I think he had some very important things to say:

 

 

 

In my favorite part of the talk, Giacchino discussed his thought process behind composing the bombastic, breathless last few minutes of George Kirk’s life. The portion where George Kirk is saying goodbye to his wife and newborn son had been originally presented to executives using fast action music filler. For the official soundtrack, however, Giacchino wanted to take a different tactic. He told the audience about the calming, focusing effect a storyteller’s hushed voice can have on an audience. Lowering his voice, growing quieter, the audience leans in. An audience in that situation, he says, listens more attentively. By lowering the action bombast into a quiet, mournful chorale and getting rid of distracting SFX, Giacchino hoped to highlight the sadness of the moment and the grief of the characters while keeping the audience on their toes. I think it works:

Did you catch that delicious musical moment right after Kirk’s birth? When the shuttles and escape pods from the U.S.S. Kelvin make their way from the battlefield like glittering stars? The music builds into a crescendo, and culminates in the grand, heroic, bombastic Giacchino main theme. It had taken him over twenty tries to develop this theme, he told the audience. Twenty. Was the dedication well worth it? The Wolf Trap audience certainly thought so. We could hardly hear the music over the cheering.

How can you apply Giacchino’s lessons in your own creative endeavors?

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The Google Chatbot Looks For God

  By Karen Osborne July 29, 2015 , , ,

What is the meaning of life?

If you don’t know, might a super-smart computer?


IBM’s Deep Blue computer beats Garry Kasparov in 1997.
Perhaps. That’s why I found the recent conversation between a human being and a Google chatbot to be absolutely fascinating. The bot’s purpose is primarily to provide customer assistance and answers to customers’ technical issues and problems, but — like a human customer service worker — it seems to have developed its own opinions. In an experiment, the bot provided answers about its purpose in the world, what it thinks of human children, altruism, philosophy and morality.


The Cylon Brother Cavil would not really get along with Star Trek’s Data, I think.

This push of the machine towards the human — and, perhaps, the divine — is not new. On Monday, I pointed you, dear reader, towards Jei Marcade’s excellent “Sounding the Fall,” which raised questions about if an artificial intelligence had a concept of, and could search for, God. Robots searching for the meaning of life — or, at least, for their own purpose within their world, or how to feel and connect — is a well-documented trope in science fiction. Asimov’s robots struggled with it. Wall-E searched for love. Data searched for an emotional identity. The Cylons searched for God.

Here’s the most interesting bit, in my opinion:

Human: What is the purpose of life?
Machine: To serve the greater good
Human: What is the purpose of living?
Machine: To live forever
Human: What is the purpose of existence?
Machine: To find out what happens when we get to the planet Earth
Human: Where are you now?
Machine: I’m in the middle of nowhere.

… Skynet? Is that you?

Read the original paper on conversational modeling as published by Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, and check out more of their conversation with the bot.

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Featured image: colorsark @ deviantart, cc license
I’m dying to read this book myself, so I’m linking it here!

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Pope Francis, Capitalism & Sci-Fi

  By Karen Osborne July 17, 2015 , , ,

“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable,
labourers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable.
The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”
— Pope Francis

Pope_Francis_at_Vargihna
Pope Francis visits a favela in Brazil during World Youth Day 2014

Pope Francis spent the early part of July visiting the “forgotten countries” of South America — praying at shrines, visiting slums, playing with children and speaking with prisoners.

A central message to his visit was the excoriation of capitalist culture and the condemnation of inequality. He encouraged political and economic leaders to keep the poor in sight while doing business and making policies, condemning practices that “sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit.” He called the relentless pursuit of money “the devil’s dung,” while asking for forgiveness for colonialist offenses the Church committed against peoples living in those countries.

In honor of the Pope’s defense of the poor, here are some reads that wrestle with the fallout from capitalism, or show societies who live in a world where scarcity is no longer an issue:

Jennifer Government by Max Barry — Capitalism run rampant. Corporations now own you to the point where you change your last name when you change your job, and corporate warfare is actual warfare.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi — In the near-apocalyptic days after peak oil, humanity is fighting against environmental collapse and blight-resistant crops are the new currency; giant agribusinesses have their own armies and control the world.

Accelerando by Charles Stross — A series of interconnected short stories shows a society speeding towards the technological singularity, and the result — as Stross says, “Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete.” Oops.

The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks — Banks’s bravura take on what a post-scarcity society would be like is mostly utopian; how do people who need nothing, people who are managed by benevolent superintelligences, deal with cultures and peoples that still have war, poverty, hunger and privation?

Star Trek: First Contact — The comedy choice, included in this list because of its meta-interest. The post-scarcity Enterprise meets the resource-strapped world after World War III, and much of the funny moments in the film have to do with characters that know only want dealing with characters that have never wanted at all.

Finally, for a real economist’s take on whether capitalism would be something that could even happen at lightspeed-or-less, read Paul Krugman’s paper, The Theory of Interstellar Trade.

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Religion in “Killjoys”

  By Karen Osborne July 13, 2015 , , ,

It’s not very often that we get to see the development of a sci-fi religion right under our noses — that’s why I’m so excited about Syfy’s Killjoys.

Killjoys boasts swashbuckling bounty hunters, low-budget (but effective!) SFX, and solid world-building, with its monolithic Company and class-stratified Quad reminding me (and the rest of the world) a little of the long-lamented Firefly. There’s a female lead. And, most importantly to our purposes here at Sacred Earthlings, there’s a church.

There’s not a lot to examine yet, so let’s look at what we have and come back to the analysis a little later:

Screen-Shot-2015-06-21-at-11.54.15-PM-e1434966924484-1024x656_f_improf_600x385Monks “hang out” in downtown Westerley.

In the pilot, “Bangarang,” our heroes go to an informant named “God,” a “scarback monk” living among the human detritus of main-street Westerley. We’re not sure what diety these monks believe in, but they do seem to function as sin-eaters of a sort; by suffering, the monks say, they can cleanse penitents of their sins. The monk here is practicing suspension, where hooks are periodically pierced through skin at periodic intervals to elevate and hang a human body. (This is a practice seen throughout the world, most specifically in ancient religious practices of the Mandan tribe in North Dakota, and in modern times done by performance artists).

flagellantsFlagellants from a medieval manuscript.

The word “scarback” also reminds me of the self-flagellation and the practice of mortification of the flesh, practiced throughout Christian history. “God” is also somewhat of a liberation theologist; he’s a freedom fighter against the Company using his cover as a monk to his own advantage.

Screen-Shot-2015-06-22-at-12.32.21-AM-e1434966329444-1024x604_f_improf_600x354One of these things is not like the other…

The second time we see monks of “the church,” they’re attending a fancy party on the high-class world. They seem to be passing through, mostly, wearing saffron-colored robes reminiscent of modern Buddhist monks. The Buddhist robe is meant to remind the adherent that he or she has committed to higher spiritual ideals; why they’re at the party, we never find out.

I’m looking forward to seeing where Killjoys goes with this, and how the church is going to figure into the larger narrative.

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Space Catholics: The Bajorans

  By Karen Osborne July 6, 2015 , , ,

“That’s the thing about faith… if you don’t have it, you can’t understand it. If you do, no explanation is necessary.”
-Kira Nerys

The Roman Catholic Church: one of the longest standing hierarchies in Western civilization. It’s only natural that writers, filmmakers and storytellers are inspired by the Church to create their own religious structures — and it happens more often then you’d think. This periodic series will chronicle the many kinds of Space Catholics, their view on clericalism, sacramentality, sin and more, and how close — or how different — they get to the real thing.

WMF27-BajoranSymbol

THE BAJORANS from STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE

The Bajorans are, quite possibly, one of the best examples of Space Catholics, sporting a stratified clerical structure, active canon law and moral authority.

God: In Bajoran faith, “God” is represented by the mysterious “Prophets” who watch over Bajor, impart their teachings, and protect the Bajoran people from harm. For most ordinary Bajorans, they are considered divine beings, although the heroes of the series discover them to actually be super-advanced alien living in a local wormhole. This shocking news does not quite dissuade Bajoran worshippers, who choose to continue their worship and study of the Prophets and their works unabated.

36e0d5d6d0dd9013f03cace8484b13d5Pope Winn I.

The Pope: The Kai, the Bajoran spiritual leader, is elected by the Vedek Assembly — a council of high-ranking Bajoran clerics — for a life term. Bajorans are encouraged and accepted to follow the Kai’s religious teachings. Although the Kai does not put out encyclicals, his or her words are still politically important in much the same way as the Pope’s words matter to our world; there is no direct Vatican cognate, but it’s intimated that before the Cardassian occupation that Bajoran secular politics was influenced by the needs of the Kai and the Vedek Assembly, much like medieval kings’ relationship with the medieval Church.

The Bible: In Bajoran religion, the words of the Prophets are considered sacrosanct. As in Catholicism, there are various levels of translation and interpretation happening, from those who believe the Prophets words should be taken extremely literally, to those who spend their lives in interpretation; however, like Catholicism, there is a distinct code of canon law; like medieval Catholicism, it sometimes also stands in for secular law. Ordinary Bajorans have a faithful, pragmatic view of their faith and the role of the Prophets in their own lives that echoes modern Catholicism very well; many of the character Kira Nerys’ statements about religions and faith can be exchanged word-for-word with those of modern Christianity and not need to change, while other Bajorans are entirely secular or take a more violent, jihadist tack, such as when extremists blew up a school on the space station.

orb-of-prophecy-thecircleThe Orb of Shininess.

Relics: Orbs, called the “tears of the Prophets,” are centers of worship for Bajorans and function in much the same way that relics do for modern Catholics — as channels of prayer, understanding, worship and contemplation. They provide measured and definitive miraculous experiences, such as visions and healing.

BenSiskoThe Emissary was not actually Bajoran.

Jesus: This isn’t a direct cognate, but the Bajorans have a concept of “The Emissary,” a personage who would save Bajor; this figure, the character Benjamin Sisko, eventually fulfulled Bajoran prophecies by sacrificing himself for the Bajoran people. Like Jesus, he is assumed bodily into “heaven,” or the Bajorans’ “Celestial Temple.” Unlike Jesus, Sisko is fully human. Like Jesus, he was “in the world,” i.e., the entire galaxy, but “not of it,” i.e., Bajor and the Bajoran faith in particular.

Contemplative Orders: Most of the Bajoran clerical structure seems to be made up of monastic intellectuals attempting to find some way to interpret and understand the Prophets’ words.

Clericalism: A direct lift. Prylars are monks, ranjens are priests, vedeks are bishops and kais are popes.

latestSpoiler! Not actually Bajoran, either.

Holidays: during the Bajoran “Time of Cleansing,” people fast and pray, and abstain from sin. This is a cognate more to Ramadan than Lent, but it still counts.

Gender: Gender does not seem to matter to the Bajoran religious hierarchy; vedeks, Kais and regular monks are woman and man, married and single, chaste and parental.

The Devil: The pah-wraiths are Prophets from the same race who long ago willingly gave up on the path of peace, much like Lucifer rejected God.

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