WHAT IS

BEING GEDDY LEE

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“Being Geddy Lee” is an experimental exercise in the art of film-music synchronicity…with a twist.  The twist being that not only is music used to move the film’s story along, dialogue from the members of Rush is incorporated into the mix to add an element that creates an altogether different sort of synchronicity.  That is the short of it.  Read further for a more detailed look into what inspired this madness.

 

Since I first embraced film-music synchronicity back in the Summer of ’99, my natural inclination was to break ranks with what had been considered what I’ll call the ‘traditional’ school of synching thought; that a true film and music synchronicity was when one started a given album at a given point in a film and allowed both to play simultaneously, without interruption.  The most notable example of this type of synch is the infamous Dark Side Of The Rainbow (Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ played with ‘The Wizard Of Oz’).  While I certainly enjoy and respect this traditional approach to synching, I couldn’t help but allow the creative side of my make-up to get interactive with the artistic entities in question (namely music and film) and form something that was truly an individual artistic endeavor.  From the beginning this has been my mindset and why I call it an artform.  I approach a synching project in much the same way a painter approaches his or her artwork; the film is my canvas, the music is my paint, and when brought together they create what is hopefully an interesting piece of work.  Knowing that, it probably wouldn’t surprise you then that pretty much whenever I watch a film now, in the back of my mind I am always thinking “Does this movie have any synching potential?”  Of course, the large majority of them don’t, but that doesn’t keep me from analyzing the work, nor does it prohibit me from enjoying the film presented in its original state.

 

So in the Summer of 2000, I watched what instantly became one of my favourite films…”Being John Malkovich”.  The absurd storyline…a bohemian puppeteer reluctantly taking a job as a filing clerk, only to discover a mysterious portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich, and subsequently teaming up with a co-worker to charge $$$ to those who wished to ‘be someone else’ (of course, there’s much more to the plot)…coupled with superb acting performances and great cinematography, made me recommend it to anybody who’d come across my path.  Not surprisingly, I also contemplated how the film might work with regards to a synching project.

 

One of the biggest obstacles, from my perspective at least, that gets in the way of a good synch is when a film contains a lot of scenes where the characters are talking.  A major contributing factor as to why films like “The Wizard Of Oz”, “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory”, “The Matrix”, etc. have such great synching potential is that there’s lots of animated movements and facial expressions.  Nothing drags a synch down quicker than extended scenes of dialogue.  Since “…Malkovich” contained dozens of scenes where the characters were engaged in dialogue (some unbelievably hilarious dialogue, I might add!), any synch project had to be approached from a unique angle.  That’s where Rush comes in.

 

A conversation that my wife and her friend had recently, with regard to my little synching fetish, in part went something like:

 

Wife: “Dave’s working on this new synch where he’s using dialogue from Rush interviews and putting them into “Being John Malkovich”.

 

Friend: “So, is Rush the only band he uses in his synching?”

 

Good question, Wife’s Friend, and the answer is “No, not really.”  I have used other bands like Supertramp, ELP, and others to create projects, but Rush is the one band whose work I have been intimately acquainted with now for over 24 years.  And more specifically, with regard to whole “dialogue” issue, I wanted to come up with something different.  Another obsession of mine over the years has been the collecting and archiving of concert bootlegs and/or interviews from artists I admire.  While I have a myriad of artists in my archive, Rush concerts, interviews, soundchecks, etc. by far make up the bulk of my collection (a list of which, by the way, can be seen at my tape trading website Amused To Death).

 

Which leads to how the seed of this “Being Geddy Lee” project was planted.  I decided that I would listen to every interview of Rush I had (in both audio and video form) and pick out pieces of dialogue to incorporate into this project.  Having approximately 75-100 hours worth of material, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy…but nothing worthwhile in life ever is.  I also figured while I was at it, I might as well go through the dozen or so hours worth of soundcheck material I had and see if I could use that as well…as it turned out, I did.  And last but not least, there was the couple dozen Rush albums and related side projects to go through as well.  So in December of 2000, when we bought ourselves a brand new computer capable of intense audio manipulation, I commenced working on this project.  Seven months and approximately 500 man-hours later, “Being Geddy Lee” is now a reality.

 

Now that you have an idea of how the project came into being, you have a few options at your disposal…

 

You can take what I’ve said so far at face value, and if interested, you can EMAIL me to inquire about how to see this work for yourself. 

 

You can read a SUMMARY of sorts which outlines the film’s storyline, the origins of some of the audio material, the methodology I used to edit everything, and a loosely written timeline.  Spoiler factor minimal.

 

Or you could go and read my exhaustive DIRECTOR’S COMMENTARY which goes into extreme detail about the contents of BGL.  Please note that this commentary is practically a minute by minute ‘script’ if you will and thus contains major spoilers, so if the element of surprise is something you’re not concerned with, by all means check it out.