What is Spark Tower Music?
The Origins of Spark Tower Wilson's Silent Song
The District House in The Yards is where the community gathers around to
listen to live music and to meet with each other.
Run-down industrial areas and their tired residential adjuncts. The neighbourhood
where everyone knows everyone. The look that?s given to an outsider coming in,
the look that?s given to an insider who?s leaving?
The blues. The feeling of leaving home. The implacable intrusion of adulthood
into a young man?s relationship with his father. The romance against which
all the odds are stacked?
From the first time we came up with the idea, we always knew exactly what
Spark-Tower Wilson?s Silent Song was about. Details of the Yards
and the lives lived there came to us with the natural clarity of facts, and
the characters seemd to be already alive, just waiting for us to find them
in our minds? but the story itself unfolded in a complex way, and there were
times when we literally weren?t sure what was going to happen next.
The first version of the plot had a really bitter ending, where none of the
characters had got what they wanted and they all hated each other. The second
version was the same, only they made up years later. The third version we
filled with sweetness and light. We didn?t use any of those!
And, as Jeff developed a style based on the freedom of the digital media
rather than the limitations of the page and the photocopier, the way we told
the story mutated as well. We had a very loose plot outline, and Jeff worked
in bursts of inspiration ? I was quite often filling in the finished pages.
Even in the sketch stage, though, I didn?t realize at first the extent to
which Jeff?s style had expanded to fit the vision.
I was gobsmacked when I first saw the first finished pages. Rich hued and
textured, brightly coloured but mellow, with a nostalgic feel to the palette
like sepia, the images drawn in bold lines and loose curves, shifting in feel
and emphasis like the colours, to fit the demands of the story?
There are four themes which are central to Spark-Tower Wilson?s Silent Song
? music, home, love and fathers and sons ? and we?re going to write a little
about what each one of them means to us. To begin ? because in many ways that?s
where the story began ? music.
Discuss this in the Progressions
blog . View the SPARK-TOWER
WILSON VIDEO TRAILER (11 MB WMV file)
