Day 32: Meet the Protagonists: Beethoven

Originally Beethoven was going to be based on the character Father Jack Hackett from Irish television show Father Ted. Father Jack is a foul mouthed, near-deaf, alcoholic priest with a bad attitude. His dialogue in the show (with few exceptions) consists of the words “Drink” “feck” “arse” “girls” or “what?” Choosing this characterization for Beethoven was meant to make fun of Beethoven’s fiery temper and deafness in his later life.

(left )Father Jack Hackett from Irish television show Father Ted, (Right) the first design for Beethoven

If you are unfamiliar with Father Jack, here's all the introduction you need: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdkN57xvekI

When script writing began for Storkinators it was soon apparent that having three characters like this meant there wasn't much room for interesting dialogue. In Storkinators, most of the information has to be brought to the player through audio and dialogue. If we only have a brat, a one-liner guy and a guy who always says “what?”, it would be very difficult to bring any information across at all. Eventually we came across a very interesting paper on Beethoven called The Story of a Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven, A Composer Made of Fire. Read it here, its really good: http://www.artsalive.ca/pdf/mus/beethoven_all_e.pdf

Reading this paper, we learned about Beethoven’s extremely interesting life and attitude. We realized he was actually a very cool guy who was larger than life, liked women, coffee and smoking, had a fiery attitude, lots of friends and rebelled against how musicians were treated during the 18^th century. He was like the 18^th century’s equivalent of an Indie Musician! His motto was “Composers are made of Fire”, which captures how intensely he held music in high regard. In short, Beethoven was much too interesting a person to reduce his character to just his deafness and temper. His hearing was only impaired later in life as well so we went for a younger Beethoven who is still able to hear and full of fire. We still subtly attempted to include deafness in his personality by making him stubborn and a little pigheaded. He doesn’t listen to other people proverbially rather than literally.

An early sketch that is more in the direction of Beethoven’s final design

When writing the dialogue for the three protagonists, the approach taken is that the three behave like a family. Each character fulfills a role typically associated with a family, with Beethoven being the father-figure (The leader who makes final decisions for the family), Bach being the Mother (nurtures and protects the family) and Mozart the child (curious about the world and sometimes rebellious against parents). This really makes the characters click well together even if you are unaware of this approach to writing their dialogue. It is hinted at throughout the script: In Egypt Beethoven is mistaken as Mozart’s father and it is jokes that Bach must be the mother, Beethoven asks Mozart to stay close in the Amazon and Mozart exclaims “You’re not my dad you know!”. An added oddity to this is that Mozart has a father who supported him in every way and Beethoven’s father was horrible to him. They fulfill for each other the father they didn't have. Beethoven doesn't blindly support everything Mozart does but is patient and at the very least does treat Mozart with kindness, unlike Beethoven’s father did him.

And thus concludes our little Meet the Protagonists bit! We hope you've enjoyed these last few posts and we may do more in future if we think of anything else to write about. Today we had our midyear presentation but we'll write about it tomorrow. Its time to go home. :P