Photo credit: Phil Rogers
Words by Jonnn Li
When the creative and commercial worlds collide, how do you ensure commercial interests don’t sterilise creative ideas? Ben Briand (Cherub Pictures) and Basil Hogios (First Cut Studio) talk about singing, beatboxing, and pleasing demanding clients.
In musical fusion, the line between symphony and cacaphony can be fine indeed. Negro slaves succeeded in blending ragtime and African microtonal music to create Jazz and Blues. We got Baroque Metal from classically-trained death-metal guitarists. But what would you call the unlikely marriage between beatboxing and operatic singing?
Never mind what it’s called. For director Ben Briand and composer Basil Hogios, of Cherub Pictures and First Cut Studio respectively, they woke up one day to find this their mission, (if they chose to accept it). Accept it they did, and by the time this mission was accomplished, a thirty-second television advertisement for Vicks Vapodrops was the result.
There is a raw, wholesome feel to the final product, and that’s no accident. Briand is a big fan of what he calls ‘organic scriptwriting’.
“Some people do everything in order; write the script, film it, put in the music… I’ll sit down with Basil from the very beginning,” says Ben. “When you’re working with a Beatbox choir, you can’t just add the music on at the end – the music was the script.”
Hogios, his partner in crime, also comes from the organic school of thought. He’s self-taught, his musical education coming from piano lessons. The technology, he says, he also taught himself.
For Hogios, this liberates his mind from the strict orthodoxy of modern art music and allows him to “create images with sound.”
Working with artists from such diverse backgrounds requires a certain amount of musical flexibility.
“At the first rehearsal, there was almost a West Side Story-style standoff between them,” he says. “You’ll say to the beatboxers ‘Yo, that was phat!’ and then you’ll turn around to the singers and say ‘okay, let’s take it from bar 32′.”
At the end of this amazing process, the unlikely marriage became a serendipitous encounter; and beatboxing and opera lived happily ever after.
