George Fenton and The Blue Planet Live. A Concert of Harmony and Nature.

Excerpted from FSM Vol. 8, No. 4, on sale now...

The year 2002 was a good one for George Fenton. He scored Sweet Home Alabama for Disney, Sweet 16 for Director Ken Loach and Christopher Hampton's soon-to-be released Imagining Argentina. He also embarked on one of his most ambitious projects to date. A series of large orchestral concerts for "The Blue Planet Live." built around Sir David Attenborough's award-winning BBC TV nature series The Blue Planet, for which Fenton wrote the music, has been turned into a audio-visual extravaganza that features the score being performed live and synched to The Blue Planet film projected on to large screens. After playing at the Festival Hall in London, Hyde Park was the first major outdoor venue, playing to a crowd of 6,000 as part of the 2002 BBC "Prom in the Park" series. For both London shows, Fenton conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Boys Choir from Magdalen College, Oxford. This March he traveled to Hong Kong to conduct the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra for three sold-out "Blue Planet Live" concerts, and the ambitious project makes its American debut at the Hollywood Bowl this July. Debonair, Fenton's own Internet record label releases some of his soundtrack recordings and a variety of original music and recordings.

FSM: The Blue Planet BBC TV series is a history of the oceans. How does it work as a live concert experience?

George Fenton: The Blue Planet TV series really is a comprehensive study of the complete ocean system and in order to cover it properly it involved filming over five years. Some 7,000 hours of film was shot in order to extract the eight 50-minute TV films that was the format of the series. Because they were in the ocean for weeks and weeks on end they got stuff on film that had never been shot before. For example the grey whale being hunted by the killer whale. That had never been documented before, let alone filmed. And for the deep-sea footage, shot some two miles down, something like 10 percent of the creatures filmed are new to science. So there are great fantastic sequences with a recognizable dramatic form. A beginning, middle, and an end. A story if you like. So from a musical point of view I had the chance to write quite big emotionally driven music. When I was playing the cues back and mixing in the studio I realized that the work had huge cinematic potential and the movie of The Blue Planet is something we are working on for a hopeful autumn release. And then, out of that idea, Jane Carter, the BBC TV producer, suggested we do a concert to help promote the TV show and launch of the album.

The really big difference between the TV series and the concert show is this: Whereas the TV version is science-driven, the show, because it is a concert, is emotionally driven and therefore the reaction of the audience is not about science. It is about responding to the awesome images being projected and watching an orchestra work live to bring those images into some sort of narrative focus for them. And we do include an aspect of science as well because before each cue, Sir David Attenborough, series producer Alistair Fothergill or myself introduce some of the explanations behind the images. So I really hope that it is an inclusive show for the audience. The film footage is very much the center of the show and so in that respect the stars of the show are the fish. And I think the audience is inclusive in that they get to find out what a thrill it is to make those films and how important it is. And I think that there is a market for concerts that are inclusive rather than exclusive for an audience.

FSM: So how does the structure of the show work?

GF: My original background in music is theater. I grew up doing music for plays by Shakespeare and Shaw. So when I think of the show I think in terms of the level of impact you want to deliver to an audience at a time. So I wrote an introduction fanfare for the show to accompany footage of the Northern Lights to settle people into the show. Sir David Attenborough then arrives on stage to introduce the blue whale sequence, probably the most emotive footage of the series. And then I play the title music over a montage of footage, and the audience gets the impact of the full orchestra and choir. I thought it would be then be good to draw back from that and take the images away and let the audience know that they are at a concert and also introduce the orchestra and choir. So we go into a song written by Edward Elgar called "Where Corals Lie." It was originally written for solo voice but we have arranged it for choir and orchestra. It was not originally in the TV series, so it really helps the audience to define the show as something quite separate from the TV show.

We then go into a scene entitled "Spinning Dolphins," which is an up-tempo tuneful melody before the grey whale hunt and then into the deep ocean scenes. We show footage shot some two miles down and show the incredible things that live down there in the dark. That ends with a vertical migration back up to the surface of the ocean again and we do a big concert piece to go with shots of busy sharks and birds on the surface.

The thing that I am trying to do with the show is to show people as many ocean habitats as possible. So at the start of the second half we begin with a piece that accompanies shots of coral reefs taken at both night and day and to show the contrast in activity between night and day in and around the coral. As a kind of musical contrast I went for a more electronic experimental feel accompanied by solo flugelhorn and trumpet. The last really meaningful scene is the killer whale attacking the seals on the beach. The whales hit the beach at some 40 mph. It is quite an incredible sight.

The penultimate track is a song by Charles Trenes, a French songwriter whose work I have always admired. So we do a version of "La Mer" using the original recording with Trenes singing. The orchestra joins in with the recording and then the choir joins in and takes up the vocal duties. At that point, the sea footage captions are put up over the footage, which are facts supplied by the World Wildlife Fund, concerning the damage that humans are doing to the oceans.

"La Mer" is a love song so it's use is kind of ironic and it is also a way of saying thank you to the audience for coming along. Hopefully they will be endorsing the ultimate aim of the show, which is to try and get people to understand the oceans well enough to protect them. And so far, the audiences' reactions seem to have been that the they feel the show is inclusive and that they feel pleased to have made a gesture by coming to see the show.
 

For the full story, see FSM Vol. 8, No. 4
 

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com