TinkerBell and the Secret of the Wings part 2

TinkerBell and the Secret of the Wings

Cast: Timothy Dalton, Lucy Hale, Megan Hilty
Genre: Animation, Action, Family
Rated: G
Running Time: 75 minutes


Science Meets Art
When the "Secret of the Wings" filmmakers began creating the snow-covered Winter Woods where Periwinkle and the winter fairies live, they wanted to accurately portray the world of perpetual cold. With this high level of authenticity as her goal, director Peggy Holmes looked for an expert. Her search led to the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Utah and Dr. Thomas H. Painter in particular, whose impressive academic and scientific achievements include a Ph.D. in geography and a NASA grant in "Astrobiology of Icy Worlds: Habitability, Survivability and Detectability."

Thomas H. Painter, now a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a research professor at UCLA, is one of the most highly regarded experts in snow hydrology, radiative impacts of light-absorbing impurities on snow and glacier melt, multispectral remote sensing and imaging spectroscopy, and solar system astrobiology.

"'Snow hydrologist' means that I study how snow and snowmelts affect the Earth's water cycle," Dr. Thomas H. Painter clarifies. "And remote sensing means that, as a scientist, I use satellite data and airborne data to look at the Earth to explore the properties of snow."

Reviewing the script, Dr. Thomas H. Painter quickly had input. "The way the snowstorm was originally set up, and the way the fairies responded to it, was technically troublesome," Dr. Thomas H. Painter notes. So, with Dr. Thomas H. Painter's direction, including a series of lectures about thermal conductivity and thermodynamics, the filmmakers were able to retool the script for accuracy. With their newfound understanding of the effects snow and ice have on vegetation and physical structures, the team had an opportunity to present the Winter Woods in a fresh and scientifically grounded way.

The filmmakers were adamant that even the snow animation had to be realistic. "Getting snow right is not easy," Thomas H. Painter explains. "Despite everybody's mental vision that snow is white-it actually has many, many colours. Even when it looks white, it has sparkles from individual crystals of the surface, sparkles of red and green and blue. And so we talked through that and made sure that the team understood that a nice, fresh snowfall has to have a sparkle to it to be true to life."

"John Lasseter really encourages us to do a lot of research," notes Peggy Holmes. "Winter is so beautiful. And we really didn't want this to be Christmas-y. For us, winter is not a season; it's a place. Some people live in winter the whole time, so we wanted to capture that correctly."

The way that snow and ice are portrayed is of great importance in order to make animation as physically realistic and meaningful as possible. "What I discovered about Disney is that if everything is done as realistically as possible, then when magic happens, it works because it stands out against the background of reality," Thomas H. Painter notes.

Thomas H. Painter recalls, "Peggy Holmes would call me up and say, 'All right, I've got to make sure that this is right ... and this is right ... and this is right.' So we would work through problems. It was very satisfying going between science and art and being able to help out in this creative form.

Sisters, Sisters
To maintain the authenticity and integrity of the relationship between Tinker Bell and her sister, Periwinkle, the "Secret of the Wings" filmmakers reached out to Dr. Nancy L. Segal, one of the world's most prominent twin-research scholars. Nancy L. Segal, a Ph.D. in social sciences and behavioural sciences from the University of Chicago (now a professor of psychology and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton), was called upon to offer real-life parallels of twins who were reunited later in life after being separated at birth. Dr. Nancy L. Segal visited the Disney studios to offer the filmmaking team her scholarly insight into twin relationships. Segal focused her tutorials on twins separated at birth and how, because Tinker Bell and Periwinkle are fraternal, they would not be the same in every way. "The filmmakers really wanted things to be realistic," Dr. Nancy L. Segal notes. "I know that in any kind of fictional work you have a license to do what you want, but I think that the creative people at Disney know that it means more when things are realistically portrayed. After all, there will be fraternal twins in the audiences, and their parents too, and they will watch the movie and know whether or not what they see is authentic.

"'Secret of the Wings' focuses on a set of fraternal twins, so I talked about those relationships," Dr. Nancy L. Segal continues. "Among the traits in personality and temperament that fraternal twins might share are intelligence, artistic skills and musical abilities. But they're not going to match all behaviours, because they differ across the genetic spectrum. On the other hand, identical twins would share the same characteristics."

The emotional impact upon twins who discover each other after years of separation can be astonishing, says "Secret of the Wings" director Peggy Holmes of Tinker Bell and Periwinkle's desire to stay together once they discover their heredity. "We all need connections. I think that there are little girls out there who don't have sisters but who, after watching this movie, will be inspired to find a sister friend, someone they can share things with. They may feel they're a little different on the outside, but inside they're the same. That's a really important message in this film."

"I was thrilled to be part of the process," Dr. Nancy L. Segal enthuses. "I am a great believer in academics presenting research findings to the real world, and I was very happy that Disney contacted me. I love to inform people and to share the passion and excitement that I feel for the topic of twins."

The Music
Composer Joel McNeely, one of the most prominent and prolific composers in the industry, has been contributing music scores to motion pictures for more than two decades. Joel McNeely has provided the music for all the Tinker Bell feature films. "Thematically and texturally, the music has all come from a common foundation, which I established with the first Tinker Bell film," Joel McNeely says of the orchestral work that he created to enhance the emotional impact of the story for audiences. "In the first film I established certain themes, one of which is 'Tinker Bell's Theme' and one we call the 'The Fairies Theme.' Those have been consistent throughout the franchise, not only with the movies but the theme parks too."

But each individual movie has its own thematic material as well as texture, and the tones of the scores are unique to that film. For "Secret of the Wings," Joel McNeely says that he worked very hard to establish a musical representation of what winter would sound like if it were music. "I've given each of the distinct worlds-the Winter Woods and Pixie Hollow-its own musical identity. They are very different and when the characters cross from one world to the other you'll hear the music shift noticeably."

What does winter sound like? Joel McNeely's interpretation is a musical pallette that includes "Thin brittle sounds. Details that don't have a lot of warmth or body to them," the composer says. "Specifically, I used a lot of crystal wine glasses. Rubbing the rims brings out an ethereal sound. I also used a waterphone, which is a very high-pitched percussion instrument, and I included a small amount of electronic colours of very icy sounds that I designed myself."

Director Peggy Holmes had a very specific idea of the kind of music score she wanted for "Secret of the Wings," and Joel McNeely was happy to have an enthusiastic captain at the helm. "I think Peggy Holmes' background as a dancer and choreographer gives her a greater understanding of music and rhythm and tempo and pace," the composer says. "She had very specific input for me, and along the way she was able to communicate things that she wanted emphasised or deemphasised. I found Peggy to be wonderfully specific about what she was going for. If something wasn't working for her, she was able to articulate it in a very definite way that I could understand and make adjustments for what she wanted."

The characters have their own themes too. Although they change in each movie, they are signatures that audiences will identify with Tinker Bell, and now with Periwinkle. "For Periwinkle's theme, I thought for a long time about the story and the fact that Periwinkle is Tinker Bell's sister," Joel McNeely continues. "Periwinkle is a sister from a different world so I developed a melody that is exclusive to her. It's a little more longing and less confident than Tinker Bell's theme. It's actually a secondary melody that I've written, a counterpoint to the Tinker Bell theme. You'll hear them separately in the movie but the real arrival of those two themes as counterpoint to each other happens at the end of the movie where Tinker Bell and Periwinkle fly over Pixie Hollow. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that fits together. The themes work perfectly in complement to each other when played on top of the other. You could say that Periwinkle's theme is Tinker Bell's theme backwards."

One might think that having written the film scores for all of the Tinker Bell movies, the process would become a little easier and less complicated for one as accomplished as Joel McNeely. It seems to be the opposite. "I probably make it harder than it needs to be," the composer laughs. "I try to reinvent the wheel every time. My goal is that you'll listen to this score and say, 'That's "Secret of the Wings."' And the same is true for all the other films. They are all unique.

Musical Influences
When McNeely began his "Tinker Bell" journey it was important to him that the music for Pixie Hollow reflect the world in which these mythical creatures exist. He found the huge extent to which fairies are in the literature of Ireland to be amazing. "I was trying to decide what the music would sound like, and in my research I found so many plays and poems and sonnets about fairies that were set in England and Ireland. So I couldn't get away from Celtic music. It fit naturally. So that was my tonal and textural decision for the first movie."

When moving away from Pixie Hollow as "The Great Fairy Rescue" does, Joel McNeely identified the story with the great composers of England. "That score was much more based on the English classical music and folk songs of the early 20th century. Composers such as Ralf Vaughn Williams and Benjamin Britten were big influences."

In addition to his music score for "Secret of the Wings," Joel McNeely produced and arranged two original songs written by Valerie Vigoda (winner of the 2009 Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award) and her husband Brendan Milburn-"The Great Divide," sung in the film by the popular McClain Sisters, and "We'll Be There," performed by Sydney Sierota.

China, Sierra and Lauryn McClain are the talented singing trio who, earlier this year, received critical acclaim for their vocal performance of the song "Rise," on the Disneynature "Chimpanzee" soundtrack. "The opening line of 'The Great Divide' made me immediately fall in love with the song and the concept," says China McClain, who also stars as Chyna Parks in the Disney Channel Original Series "A.N.T. Farm." "The entire song fit Periwinkle and Tinker Bell's relationship so well. I cried after watching an edit of the 'The Great Divide' music video. The depth and meaning of the lyrics, especially in the bridge, finally hit me and made me realise how much the song actually relates to my sisters and me. We have a strong personal relationship as well as a business one and I wouldn't have it any other way."

Stylistically, composers for animated films have retained an approach to scoring that live action seems to have moved away from. Joel McNeely agrees and says, "In general, the music in animation tends to be much more thematically driven and tends to comment more on the action that the audience is seeing. The music will emulate particular events in the action. The music doesn't tend to change or modulate based on what's happening on the screen."

The creative process in any medium is unique to every artist and Joel McNeely says that in this day of many composers writing with computer programs, he retains a semi- antiquated technique. "I have a kind of anachronistic set up," McNeely says. "I came up in a generation when composers still wrote music the way they always have since people started writing music; which was with pencil and score paper. I worked that way for a couple of decades and became so quick at it that I didn't need a keyboard to write.

I could sit by a pool with a lap desk and compose. However, two years ago, I was walking through the DisneyToon Studios and saw animators working with 21-inch monitors that were also tablets. In other words, they could draw on their monitor with a stylist. This was the first time I'd seen a monitor combined with a tablet. I went out and bought one and had it mounted on my piano. Now I compose in Photoshop!"

The objective of a film score always is the achievement of supporting the story without being intrusive. "It's a fine line underscoring something or putting too much emphasis on a theme," Joel McNeely says. "In fact, making the audience aware that the music is trying to lead them somewhere would be a failure in my process. I try to be subtle. There are times when I'm telling a story with my music and you may not even be aware that that's going on. But toward the end of the film, as you've heard these themes along the way, they start to resonate and hopefully impact how you feel about the story."