I had known of the author John Sharkey from his groundbreaking book, first published in 1973, ‘Celtic Mysteries’. This Internationally best selling book in so many ways paved the way for the many books on the Celtic and ancient tradition to follow which have developed such a great amount of interest across the World. Our destinies converged when we moved to Wales and discovered we lived close to each other. John has spent most of his life travelling and researching ancient history, Sacred sites, archaeology and spirituality of the ancestors of the prehistoric past. His script for the Film reflects his enormous understanding of the subject and yet is be enigmatic enough for the listener to be drawn into the film by the conversational approach set up by the two narrators.

My own interest in the Grail and Celtic tradition is well known from my music albums but I have always had a special interest in the neolithic stone age cultures that allowed these impressive monuments to be erected and what reasons lay behind the collective consciousness of these people. To find the time needed to construct such structures has to be the strongest link to the spirit of deeper significance and the root in a strong belief to preserve the collective Soul of their ancestors. Today, we do well to reflect on whether any of our present day structures could ever get close to surviving 5,000 years from now and whether our descendants will understand our present cultures at all!

We set out in 2001 to create a film that celebrates our 5-6,000 years of neolithic ancestry with a special focus on the Sacred stone sites which are still standing in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Spending 4 months for 4 years on location travelling over 12,000 miles enabled 35 hours of film to be shot. In the Winter of 2006, I set about editing this footage, along with a number of pictures painted on location and in my art studio, along with composing the 90 minutes of music required for the film.

In 2005 we had recorded the narration script written by John Sharkey and it was through links from this writing, together with the music which was starting to take shape that grew an idea that the imagery of the Film would require a novel artistic feel and look.

Coincidentally, a multi talented software designer, John Dalton, who I had known from the early days of his award winning music software design a decade earlier, had just released the innovative ‘Studio Artist’ for the Macintosh computer. This outstanding program enables the artist to interactively use what can be described as intelligent-assisted drawing and painting algorithms which use smart brush techniques that can be dynamically controlled and used to create new visual functions. These can then be auto-rotoscoped to individual film frames in layers. In other words, this unique software turns film into moving painting as well as providing new visual processing capabilities. The only downside to all of this was that each frame of the Film is processed in an extensive animation style which takes minutes and sometimes hours to render. I have calculated that this has taken some 18,000 computer hours to render the 135,000 frames needed for this film! However, the result is a unique ever changing visual feast of colour and feel, contributing strongly towards it’s enigmatic title as being ‘Rays of Light’.

The challenge I set myself of composing the music was to express the atmosphere of these Sacred places using a wide dynamic approach. As a professional film and TV composer, I had for the first time the pleasure of being able to compose the music prior to the film editing and in many sections I was able to take full advantage of this by editing the narration and film to the completed music. My own extensive research into ancient modal forms and tunings has enabled me to express in the music a primal feeling whilst using local folk song oriented melodic unison phrases and rhythmic motifs. A good example of this is in the Ring of Brodgar section where I have been able to rearrange one of the earliest of all the Viking songs, the 12th century Hymn to St Magnus, with its extraordinary polyphony in parallel thirds juxtaposed with the tolling of a bell to depict the sea fairing nature of these islands. The final surround sound 5.1 music mix can also be experienced on the DVD without the narration.

A special mention must be made to our friend Margaret Jacob, without whose help together with her faith and patience this film production would not have been possible.

Finally, I hope you will find that ‘Rays of Light’ shines out as a unique visual and audio experience.

Adrian Wagner. September 2009.

adrian@adrianwagner.com