MERCURY MUSIC

I often listen to music while writing and storyboarding. While I'm doing research for a film, I find music which fits the story mood and atmosphere and typically have that playing in the background while I work throughout pre-production. Here are some tracks which were an inspiration both for the tone of The Mercury Men and it's eventual soundtrack.

Vertigo and The Day the Earth Stood Still
You can't make a 50's styled black and white sci-fi series without drawing a little inspiration from Bernard Herrmann. While our score doesn't feature any theramin (we chose a more organic sounding and equally eerie violin in its place), there are small touches which draw from Bernard's style.

Vertigo - Prelude - The City O...

The Day The Earth Stood Still ...

Neptune the Mystic (from Holst's Planets Suite)
Of all the music, the Planets Suite by Gustav Holst has had the greatest influence on The Mercury Men. So much so that several pieces of it are actually used in the score. For a series about space and beings from another planet, Holst's celestial suite is a perfect fit. Neptune in particular has a great sense of mystery, wonder, and uncertainty about it.

Holst: Neptune - The Mystic - ...

The Map Room (from Raiders of the Lost Ark)
I've made no secret about my love of Raiders, or it's great influence on our series. And while the entire John Williams soundtrack was looped endlessly during writing sessions, this track in particular captured the tone I was aiming for in several scenes.

The Map Room: Dawn - John Will...

The New World Symphony No. 9 in E Minor
Antonin Dvorak's American inspired symphony captures the adventurous spirit of both our great frontiers, the West of the late 1800's and space of the 1960's. In fact, Neil Armstrong even took a recording of this symphony to the moon with him. Like the Planets suite, selections from this are used in The Mercury Men score (both of which are public domain). This track has a slow start, but when it gets going you'd swear you were listening to a great serial soundtrack.

Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 In E Mi...

Do you listen to music while you write? What songs do you listen to?

INFLUENCES: O HOLY NIGHT

What? How in tarnations can a Christmas carol influence pulp science fiction? Well, inspiration can come from the least likely of places.

At a Christmas Eve midnight candlelight church service in 2007, while singing O Holy Night (one of my favorite Christmas carols and the very first song to EVER be played over radio), a single lyric jumped out at me. At the time I was in the middle of writing the screenplay for The Mercury Men and was trying to figure out what the story was REALLY about. Sure, it's about glowing men shooting lightning, space heroes, and all that fun stuff, but what is the story REALLY about? The lyric that laid it all out for me?

"Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth."

That single line was a key driving force in the screenplay. Edward is worthless. He is irresponsible and unreliable. And while Jesus will not be showing up in our series to change Edward's ways, the appearance of Jack (along with another character I must leave as a surprise), will most definitely challenge Edward to discover his worth.

So what is YOUR favorite Christmas carol? And please don't say it's that Christmas Shoes song :)

PRODUCTION DESIGN

For today's Mercury Monday post we've got our first production journal highlighting production design. If you've got a question or area you'd like to see in an upcoming production journal, post it in the comments here or on Facebook.

The production journal even got a GREAT write up from Marc Hustvedt over at Tubefilter.

UPDATE: Here's some sci-fi production design resources.

VISUAL REFERENCE
Library of Congress Flickr Photostream
NASA Image Exchange
Great Images In NASA
Pulp Cover Gallery
Comic Cover Browser
Paleo-Future

HOW TO
Indy Mogul
Studio Creations
TK560.com How To Guides (Star Wars)
H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society Prop Documents
How to Become a Production Designer
The Prop Shop Bookshelf

INFLUENCES: MYST

If you owned a computer in the mid-90's, you more than likely played Myst. It was the best selling PC game for well over a decade (upstaged by The Sims in 2007), ushered in the CD-ROM era, spawned a number of Myst-clones, and has been ported almost as many times as Tetris. All from a grassroots game made by 7 people! And while the makers of Myst (Cyan Worlds) have recently fallen on hard times, it doesn't take away from the great style of storytelling they introduced, a style video game designers should consider revisiting. So how has this screen clicking graphical adventure influenced The Mercury Men?

EXPLORATION
Myst was different from most video games. You weren't under a constant barrage of enemy attacks, dodging fire, or leaping over lava pits. You weren't given some lengthy backstory. In fact, other than a short opening monologue, you weren't given any backstory at all. You were thrown into a mysterious situation and simply began to quietly explore the island and its ages. The story was told non-verbally through the exploration. You'd open a desk drawer and learn a lot about it's owner simply by its contents.

While The Mercury Men has much more leaping, dodging, and shooting, you will find moments where there is little to no dialogue, only the characters exploring their environment and situation. Rather than have a character talk us through what every little thing is, we allow the viewer to simply watch and form their own theories. It's nice to have a little mystery and curiosity in storytelling.

A LARGER WORLD

"We started our design work and realized that we would need to have even more story and history than would be revealed in the game itself. It seemed having that depth was just as important as what the explorer would actually see."

--Rand Miller on developing Myst's fictional history

We spent months developing the larger world of The Mercury Men before writing a single line in a screenplay. I could bend your ear for hours. (Unfortunately my wife has had to listen to hours of the history of the "league" and the "first men of Mercury.") While this wealth of backstory does hopefully give some depth to the events, out of it comes our digital props as well. We can reveal little pieces of the world while still leaving some room for you the viewer to fill in the blanks with ideas and theories of your own.

ANOTHER STORY
And finally, Myst holds a special place with me for an entirely different reason. I didn't meet my father until I was 16 years old and Myst was one of the very first gifts he bought for me. We spent an entire weekend hunched over an old Compaq computer monitor exploring that world together. Immersive and interactive storytelling was cemented in me instantaneously.

AND ANOTHER STORY
Like every video game, the idea of a film based on Myst was tossed around for years. But unlike every video game, Cyan Awards chose to do something unusually spectacular. They awarded the movie rights to THE FANS! Not all fans mind you, but a few filmmaker fans. You can check out their project at http://mystmovie.com. Really looking forward to what they're putting together.

It’s an amazing thing to witness a process like that - a “bootstrap” kind of operation that by sheer force of will and fan excitement manages to pull off something big.

--Rand Miller on Myst film project

"WE CHOOSE THE MOON"

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA and AOL have put together an AMAZING site that recreates the amazing event in real time. (I've been listening to the live transmissions all day!) I can't think of a human endeavor greater than what they accomplished back on July 20th, 1969, and for it to be this well documented is equally amazing.

Being that the story of The Mercury Men is heavily based on the Apollo 11 mission, it may be a great primer to the series to watch/listen for a while.

WWW.WECHOOSETHEMOON.ORG

INFLUENCES: THE THIRD MAN

I recently held an impromptu poll on Twitter asking people what their favorite black and white film is. The top spot went to Casablanca. While my favorite goes to Seven Samurai, it would more than likely be in my top 5 films of all time even if it was in color. But a great film that is defined by black and white, and would lessen should it be in color, is Carol Reed's The Third Man.

While the cinematography and production design of The Mercury Men is generally influenced by all the great classic black and white films, the high contrast, sharp angles, and use of shadows in The Third Man played heavily into our storyboards. Orson Welles has often noted black and white as the superior format for an actor, as it draws attention to them, rather than a colorful background. If you haven't seen this film yet, I highly suggest either buying or Netflixing the latest Criterion edition.

INFLUENCES: STAR WARS

Nearly every filmmaker of my generation was influenced by Star Wars in some way or another, so no surprises there. But there is one aspect of Star Wars in particular that greatly inspired the story of The Mercury Men.

Imagine standing before a giant fence. On the other side of that fence is a great world you've never seen before. Luckily, you discover a small knothole and peek through. Though you can't see everything, you catch small glimpses of fantastic people and places. THAT is the original Star Wars film. George Lucas' Star Wars screenplay hinted at many things, mostly through the stories of old Ben Kenobi, which wouldn't be seen during the film's running time, including the powerful Jedi, the Clone Wars, the great Anakin Skywalker, and the evil Emperor to name a few. Han spoke of dangerous bounty hunters and a great crimelord, Jabba the Hutt. While many of these things have since been revealed (unfortunately so), at the time they created a deep sense of mystery and curiosity. It engages your imagination. As a viewer your mind starts to wrap a story of your own around these names and places.

Beyond flying laser bolts and masked villains, the first volume of The Mercury Men is similar to Star Wars in it's knothole approach to the greater world. We will reveal bits and pieces of the grander story, which we will explore further here on the site with digital props and even more so in volume two of the series. We'd even like to have the community of viewers contribute to the story. Can you imagine if George Lucas had asked one of us to come up with Boba Fett's backstory?

Here's a loaded question: best Star Wars movie?

UPDATE: Scott Parker shared his own fantastic take on the Star Wars "knothole" experience, which included these great excerpts:

"Of all the thirty years living with Star Wars, my favorite time is still the years between the first two films, after those chunks of imagination had been opened."

"There is something fun about having to rely on magazines, comics, and trading cards and not having an Internet with the world’s knowledge at one’s fingertips. It was like searching for treasure in every new issue of Starlog just to see if they had some new photo of Star Wars."

Read the post in it's entirety HERE.

INFLUENCES: HITCHCOCK & THE TWILIGHT ZONE

While The Mercury Men will no doubt draw comparisons to the last serial revival attempt Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (mainly in part because we're in black and white and feature a character in aviation goggles), I wanted to quickly set the record straight on the films that truly did influence the creation of our story. Therefore, throughout the week I'll be posting a look the inspirations for The Mercury Men.

TMM is originally born out of the old Hitchcockian idea of a normal man in extraordinary circumstances. In fact, the original concept short on which the series is based, was written around one simple question: what if you saved the entire world and then had to go to work the next morning? Like the classic Hitchcock characters, Edward Borman is no super-hero. He has no skills that would make him suitable for a mission of this sort. I'd go so far as to call him incompetent. Audiences will truly be wondering "how could HE possibly get out of this?" These themes are fully inspired by great Hitchcock films such as Saboteur, North By Northwest, The Wrong Man, and of course by the classic TV show The Twilight Zone.

A few weeks back I asked (via Twitter) what were people's favorite Hitchcock film, and the general consensus came to Vertigo. What's your favorite Hitchcock film?