Johnathan
Dean
Prof.
Perkins
WI_19_ART+TECH
Aeneas and
Dido
1/10/2019
Aeneas and Dido
When
I watched Dido and Aeneas for the first time, its easy enough to say that I was
mistaken by a few things. While it is true that this is a short opera and there
are only three major parts in the opera. There is plenty going on. Right from
the first scene you can see that Dido “Queen of Carthage” is having some
personal torment in a way. The people that are with her, who I can only assume
are her “workers” for lack of a better term, are also aware that she is facing torment.
You quickly learn of Aeneas “The Trojan Hero.” Dido is in love with Aeneas. At
first, I thought that this would be simple love story, In the first fifteen
minutes of the film it seems as though they had just had a ceremony to get
married. While this ceremony is happening, the workers are singing to Aeneas
about how Dido has a fire in her eyes and how she has been struck by cupids’
arrow. While I’ve never been a huge fan of plays, this part made it very clear
to me that they were talking about how Dido and Aeneas truly love each other.
Shortly after the ceremony, there
was a short scene were there was a group that would could tell would be the
villains of the story are talking/ singing about how they Aeneas was destined
for something other than just Dido. The leader of this group felt almost like a
which character. You don’t see her perform any spells by any means. However,
she speaks of a man of mercury that is going to conjure a storm to change the
path of a fleet of ships. This later shows to be very relevant in the story.
Aeneas is told that the golds are saying that he must leave and go elsewhere.
Aeneas is upset because he must leave his lover after such a short time
together. Aeneas gathers his troops and sets sail on very short notice. This
makes it so that Dido becomes very sad. Dido being the queen of her land and
her people is expected to take care of them and not to let things like love
jeopardize the health and safety of her people. The people seeing what’s
happening with Dido don’t support her anymore, and even with this she continues
to make poor decisions. Her final poor choice was that she would commit
suicide.
At first while reading through the
assignment I’m told to comment on the “mise en scene.” I truly had no idea what
it meant, and thought is was an actual scene in the opera. Mise en scene refers
to the actual area that a scene of a play or movie is shot in, what the people
are wearing, how are they reacting the area around them etc. There are things
that you can’t see that an actor can, such as small items on a set that could
dictate were the actor will step. The lighting and how they dress is also apart
of this. Mise en scene isn’t just one thing, rather a collection of things that
make a scene from a play, opera, or movie come together and turn out the way it
did.
While watching Aeneas and Dido, I
tried to focus on two things. First, how was this making me feel and how I
might have acted if it was real life, and if that was me having to do these
things. The second, was more of me just thinking about what the people of the
time might have thought when seeing this story unfold for the fist time. For
me, watching it as a film on YouTube is very different than if I was there in
person, and that’s even more different than if I was watching it during its
original release. The key differences that I would say for a film style, like
it is on YouTube, is the fact that there are several camera angles on the
scenes. This is something that you wouldn’t be able to get if you were in an
opera house watching it live. This made me really appreciate how things were
done back in the old days, and more so on how things are done in opera houses
today. The creators of these sets really must do a good job of setting up the
surroundings, but also making it clear where to focus, like how a camera
changes angles so you know what to focus on. These are things that the original
viewers of this opera wouldn’t have been able to experience.
From a gamers eye, I haven’t ever
put much thought of how I would turn a story into a video game. Sure, I’ve
created stories that I would love to turn into games. However, I haven’t ever
taken a preexisting story and tried to turn it into a video game like I did for
this one. Personally, I would have focused solely on this game being a story-based
game, Not so much of a open world, and definitely not a multi-player
experience. More of a classic adventure game. I would have to make it so that
you change from Didos story to Aeneas story. The opera only covers so much of
what happened with the two of them. To make the game more fun I would make it
so that on the Aeneas side of the story you are going into battles and
conquering like he did rather than playing out the love scenes from the opera.
While on the Dido side of the story I would have made it more of telling the
side of romance and how she ended up losing everything. Ultimately the game
would end just as Dido does in the opera. I feel that this would give the
players of my game a shock and really give them an interesting experience.
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