Shaping Ideas - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 127

strung together. The i ve-act structure worked surprisingly well, and I started to think of i ve
sections based on musical terms and themes: Overture (for introducing the characters to us
and to each other), Harmony (where things were going well), Counterpoint (where dif erences
of opinions were starting), Discord (where things started to fall to pieces spectacularly) and,
i nally, the Finale (where there was some sort of resolution and all the pieces tied together). All
in all a pleasingly neat structure, which I might not have considered had I been allowed to do
what I wanted. It is always good to be open to things developing; a painful process but usually
productive. It is tough opening up to other people's opinions, especially when they aren't close
to the project. You learn that although they have dif erent ideas, the ideas are not necessarily for
the worse - they are often better than yours!
Once I had found this structure, I knew the l avour and tone of each i lm. Wyn Davies, the
musical director, and I made a decision, in keeping with the dreamlike quality I had imposed
onto the i lm, that the songs should be sung by the voice Sullivan had written them for. Fifteen
minutes of, otherwise, just male voices would not have been true to Gilbert and Sullivan. This
led to Gilbert singing in soprano one moment, and when the song called for it, singing as a
bass. This seemed perfectly reasonable and logical to me, although the i lm has been criticised
for this. It gave us freedom to use a balance of songs, structured not just to rel ect the scope of
Gilbert and Sullivan, but also to help the drama.
No story of Gilbert and Sullivan can ignore the involvement of the more pragmatic D'Oyly
Carte, who was responsible for bringing the two men together. Taking a cue from an opera,
Iolanthe , I had Carte's sleep interrupted by his conscience. I used one of the moments in
Ruddigore , where a character is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors, to have Carte visited by
the shades of Gilbert and Sullivan (although Carte in reality did not outlive them both), giving
him cause to rel ect on the merits of his having brought the two men together and releasing
those unstoppable tunes on the public. This easily enabled me to be free of any literal staging,
and to have a dif erent styling for Gilbert and Sullivan themselves, putting them apart from Carte.
This freedom was a necessary justii cation for the surreal mayhem and cross-dressing role-
playing that followed. Gilbert and Sullivan being dead throughout the i lm added certain
poignancy, and echoed the ghosts giving Scrooge his new appreciation for life. Again, I'm
grateful to Channel 4 for imposing this structure.
In this scheme of things, the characters having dif erent voices i tted quite nicely. The
cross-dressing is there, incidentally, not as a cheap laugh, but also as a visual suggestion of
how low Sullivan thought he was sinking. He was far from happy when Gilbert had three male
characters don female identities in Princess Ida . This he thought cheap and very beneath him.
The added pressure of working on three-minute chunks was that the music and words were
even more dii cult to edit. A i fteen-minute piece would have allowed for some considerable
chunks of music, and let me cram in many dif erent examples of songs but three minutes is
tight and precise.
Wyn was familiar not just with Gilbert and Sullivan, but with music editing. We
had worked together previously to edit Verdi's epic Rigoletto into a thirty-minute
piece, and strove to ensure that we were true to the spirit of the Gilbert and
Sullivan operas. Probably one of the happiest periods in my career was sitting next
to Wyn at the piano, trying to segue one piece of music smoothly into the next,