User:Ophois/angels

Characteristics

In their true form, angels are depicted as bright lights. Most humans cannot withstand their presence, and hear the angels' voices as merely high frequency sound. Supervising Sound Editor Michael Lawshe explained that the sound department used a steady tone in mid-range of what most people hear—approximately in the 3,000 cycles range—but with "more ring and modulation so that it really vibrated". He described the sound as "not electronically loud, but it feels like the center of your forehead is going to have a little tear in it".

Unlike typical depictions of angel in the media, they must possess a willing human vessel to interact with the mortal plane. Pointing out the similarity of this requirement to that of demons, series creator Eric Kripke posited that this requirement "provided [the writers] with all sorts of useful morality plays to work through" because the "nominally good" angels force their human vessels to endure a "horrific experience". Unlike the hosts of demons, however, vessels of angels are healed of any injuries inflicted upon their bodies. This quality also extends to the vessels' clothing, which Collins jokingly attributed it to the angels' "superpower of mending and drycleaning automatically". ??? explained that they sometimes "[play] the damage out for a little bit", but only to the point that it makes sense storywise.

Angels' wings are hidden when possessing a vessel, only visible at times as shadows. Visual Effects Supervisor Ivan Hayden noted that the enhanced framing in depicting Castiel's wings in his debut appearance was part of the beginning shift for the series towards more "grandiose effects", with the prior seasons "[leaving] a lot up to the imagination". Wanting to further provide "a little feeling of wings for them", the sound department added the rustling of their wings during teleportation, which Lawshe described as a "a movement through the air when they come and go". Supervising Sound Editor Charlie Crutcher explained, however, that the sound department used this sound effect less as the fourth season progressed because the angels' teleportation is depicted as instantaneous. Instead, the sound of angel whispers became more prominent, signalling the angels' arrival. With the angels losing their wings at the end of the eighth season, Executive Producer Robert Singer noted that they can no longer teleport.

Among their various other abilities—these include telekinesis, body manipulation, and mental manipulation—angels can bend time. Although effortless with Heaven's assistance, this feat becomes taxing when done alone. QUOTE ABOUT PAST. QUOTE ABOUT FUTURE.

http://eclipsemagazine.com/television/7481/ Okay, first, not a dream. It all really happened. Yes, Dean affected the past, but he couldn’t change it. This makes sense if you think of this from the perspective of the Campbells. In the history of the Campbells, there ALWAYS was going to be a stranger named Dean Van Halen who dropped into their lives and affected things. It’s not like the Campbells lived one life, then Dean went back in time and caused them to live another. Future Dean was ALWAYS in their story…the current Sam and Dean just never knew it.

Though considered a high crime in Heaven, angels can remove their angelic "grace" and be reborn as a human. Their grace also falls to Earth, however, and can restore an angel to their true form if retrieved. Because Anna is "reborn" when she reabsorbs her grace in the fourth season, Hayden "started [the visual effect] in her womb and had this nuclear reactor type of thing that built up". When her body can no longer contain the power, it explodes in light. CASTIEL HUMAN REMOVE GRACE

Despite being impervious to mortal weapons, angels can be killed by the angelic power of a fellow angel or by being critically stabbed with an angel blade. According to BOOK author Nicholas Knight, there are three types of blades: the angel blade, "QUOTE"; the identical but more powerful archangel blade; and the ???, FATE in the sixth season episode "My Heart Will Go On". Angels are also vulnerable to Heaven's arsenal, such as ???. Stabbed by an angel blade, Uriel is the first angel killed onscreen. To accomplish the effect of light exploding from his dead body—the typical result of an angel's death—the visual effects department used a matte painting of the building the character was in and digitally added the light blasting out the building's windows. Although they also framed that scene to depict a nearby brick smokestack collapsing from the explosion, the producers found the concept "a little bit more than [they] wanted" and unnecessary for the episode. However, Hayden felt that the "high wide shot of the wings painted on the floor"—burned into the ground upon Uriel's death within the storyline—made the smokestack's omission inconsequential.

Notes

http://www.buddytv.com/articles/supernatural/exclusive-interview-with-super-25617.aspx Yeah, you know I've probably read more of the Book of Revelations than of any other religious text in my entire life. Constantly going back and referring to that. You know not everything we do, is directly from the Book of Revelations. It's that we're taking little pieces of it and we're manipulating it to serve our means, and I think very much in the spirit of what it represents. I don't think we're totally mangling anything. Jeremy Carver

http://tvline.com/2011/05/20/supernatural-misha-collins-season-7/ Sera Gamble A change so big it calls for less of a focus on Cas and the goings-on in heaven? While there will be angel stories in Season 7, “they will probably be more self-enclosed,” reveals Gamble. “[In Season 6], we consciously kept some of this angel civil war off camera because we are interested in what happens on Earth,” she explains. “We are interested in what happens in the purview of the boys. We feel that in terms of what we can accomplish, the scope of the show, our storyline is best accomplished where the Impala can go.”

http://www.buddytv.com/articles/supernatural/exclusive-interview-with-super-25355.aspx

"The threat of Lucifer, we don’t really see it as religious per se. Although we do use the Bible as a source, we just see it as the flip-side of the Supernatural coin because we’ve been writing about demons for four seasons now, so it was time to pull the curtain back and look and see what else was there." Gamble

How do you go about creating your own Supernatural show mythology versus using all of that actual religious stuff that exists? "We give ourselves a lot of license to draw from mythology around the world, first of all. And when it comes to the question of God, we leave ourselves a lot of room. There are characters on the show that either don’t believe in God or are very deeply agnostic. And the angels we meet on the show, they don’t have the direct Bat Phone to God. They are very low to the ground, they are soldiers working on Earth. So we’ve constructed a mythology that’s really not about God, it’s about a war that’s happening here on planet Earth between a few angels and some demons and then our characters, the Hunters, who are sort of caught in the middle." Gamble

Issue 9, Director's Cut: Robert Singer "Traditionally, angels are warriors of the Lord... There's lots of smiting and things that go on in the Bible by angels, and that's the angel model we're going after [in the show]." Singer, p.31

Issue 10, Fall From Grace, by Jayne Nelson "I think it's not that they don't have emotions - this is my take on it - but I think that their world up in Heaven seems very militant; what I imagine being in the military would feel like. There's not much time to sit around and feel; to think about feelings and have emotions. You have a job, you're given an order, and you follow it." p.28

Issue 10, Appetite for Destruction, by Bryan Cairns "The end justifies the means in the angelic world, and humans are just specks on the planet. Smiting a whole town to take out an evil is an incidental thing to do. We can't get our heads around the magnitude of it, so we call it evil. It mirrors some of things we see like hurricanes, tsunamis, and natural disasters where we wonder, 'How can there be a God?'" Wisdom, p.55

Issue 13, Supernatural Visions, by Nicholas Knight "In season four through season five, there's been a shift in the visual effects - they're getting bigger. Because it's getting toward that apocalyptic climax, we're seeing some more of the grandiose effects that we shied away from in the first three seasons when we left a lot up to the imagination. For example, with the introduction of Castiel in season four, when we did the angel wings shot [in Lazarus Rising], we enhanced the framing that was there, and when Eric and everyone saw that it !!! was a very effective shot, that set the stage for visual effects from then on. It's been like a freight train ever since." Hayden, pp.57-58

Issue 14, Things That Go Bump in the Night, Nicholas Knight

"It makes it interesting because we always try to be as 'real' as we can, so with the angels it's not some choir type thing coming up [in the mix], because our angels have a lot of attitude. It's not a soft sound when they're here. The softest we get is probably when they appear or disappear because we want a little feeling of wings for them, a movement through the air when they come and go." Supervising sound editor Michael Lawshe, p.66

"From the angels' first appearance - Castiel's entrance - we had the sound of wings, but little by little we're getting away from hearing the wings because often the angels just appear and disappear. The introduction of Anna, who heard angel voices, started the sound of angel whispers. Sometimes the angels appear so fast there's no chance for it, but for something like Chuck saying, 'They're coming!' we'll hear the angel whispers." Supervising sound editor Charlie Crutcher, p.66

High frequency noise: "You have to be right on that edge, because there are certain frequencies that the human ear is tuned to that are in most people's mid-range, and that's the one you want to pick, because it doesn't have to be super loud, but people [will] think it is. Something in the 3,000 cycles range cuts through really bright. You go just long !! enough that people want to turn it off, but by the time they reach for the remote, poof, we're out of that scene." ML, pp.66-67

Supernatural 4 Companion

"This was the only way Supernatural could engage with the subject of angels: a seraphim rife with conspiracy, arrogance, corruption—the Bible as told by Serpico. They're here to win it all—for themselves." Ben Edlund, p.6

"So I'd been very resistant to the idea, but then in between season three and four, I was thinking about the problem of how the demon mythology was getting kind of boring for us. Every time a demon came up as an episode idea [in season three], my co-show runner, Bob Singer, and I always sort of sighed and said, 'Alright, what are we going to do with the demons this time?'" "How can we possibly expand and twist our mythology?...Well, if you're looking at it purely in a yin-yang way, if you're looking at two sides of a coin, angels are the other side of the demon coin. Then one of my first thoughts was of Christopher Walken in The Prophecy—'Well, youknow, you can do angels where they're not good guys. You can do angels as nominally good in that they're fighting for Heaven, but they're soldiers'. I started thinking about the siting of the first-born and of Sodom and Gomorrah. I was considering all that and I thought, 'Well, you actually could have angels and have them be truly terrifying.' To give credit where credit is due, it's Sera who showed me the poems by Rainer Maria Rilke about how scary angels could be, so in the back of my head there was already this notion that angels in their true forms were such overwhelming powers that they could be really terrifying." Kripke, pp.8-9

"We knew from the beginning, day one in the [writers'] room, just from thinking about angels and how to characterize them, that they were ultimately going to be the bad guys. And we knew that they were ultimate going to want to bring on the Apocalypse. We also knew that Ruby and Lilith were working in concert to manipulate Sam to go darker and darker and to ultimately kill Lilith, that the final way to bring up the Devil was going to b this suicidal move by Lilith. Because we knew all that, we were really confident and comfortable in having fun with what the build-up to those twists were going to be. We put in lots of misdirection, but when you look back the second time you can see that things don't mean what you thought they meant, but it all adds up. That was another reason season four was so satisfying." Kripke, pp.10-11

"If Castiel had not been as incredibly charismatic and as complicated as he turned out to be, we would've grown tired of that storyline and ended up killing him and blowing the angel storyline off, like we have in the past to other storylines that haven't entirely worked for us. The guy who really deserves the majority of the credit for that is Misha Collins, because he came in and he immediately had such chemistry with Jensen and Jared and was able to hold the screen with them He was just such the total package in terms of giving a really complicated, interesting, charismatic performance, and you just wanted to know more about this character because of him. Ultimately, it through Castiel that we iew the angel mythology—he's the one that introduced it to us, he's the one who expanded it. Zachariah, Uriel, and Anna fleshed out the mythology, and made it so fun, but the fact is that it all started with Misha's Castiel." Krike, pp.11-12

"We were really adamant babout it not getting out. We published fake casting side for actors because those tend to leak on the internet, we published misleading dialogue that would make people think the episode was heading in a different direction, and we change characters' names." Kripke, p.12

Lazarus Rising "It makes your ears ring, quite literally. We used a steady tone in the center of the range that most people hear, but with more ring and modulation so that it really vibrated. We actually did turn down the volume working on that scene in a couple of places. It's not electronically loud, but it feels like the center of your forehead is going to have a little tear in it." Supervising sound editor Michael Lawshe, p.23

"The most unique element about angels that isn't in typical lore is the notion that they have to possess. They control a human host in much the same way demons do. The only difference is that angels have to ask permission, and demons don't. That provided us with all sorts of useful morality plays to work through, because the angels are nominally good, but they are putting human victims through this horrific experience just because the humans were devout enough to give their will away. Demons and angels actually have more in common with each other than they do with humanity, so they play by the same rules, in a way." Kripke, p.24

"The existence of non-corporeal entities possessing from both the demonic stripe and the angelic stripe indicates an underlying physical world that we don't know about, which is consistent with the supernatural physics of our universe. Lucifer, who was an angel, goes to Lilith, and using some of his angelic power, which comes from God, he twists her into a demon, so it's like using good for bad. Demons are linked to humanity, but they are different, and their difference comes from angelic intervention, so ultimately demons are a bit of a fusion between human stuff and angel stuff, therefore it makes sense to me that their ability to possess, their ability to become non-corporeal, and all the other things that are not normally !!! the province of humanity, actually stem from the angelic perversion that came from Lucifer." Co-executive producer Ben Edlund, pp.24-25

"You'd think that angels would have a lot of freedom to do the right thing, but they have absolutely no freedom at all. They're soldiers, and they come down and do what they're told. It's not that they don't have any emotions, in the sense that they're robotic or don't react; it's just that they don't care how they're perceived by humans. There's a blind obedience on the side of the angels, where they do what they're told whether they think it's right or not... or whether they feel bad about it or not." Director J. Miller Tobin, p.25

"[Anna] was envious of human emotions. The ability to love, to cry, to have joy, and even to be hurt-all those things that we take for granted, angels don't have because they have to be perfect. Anna was longing for the imperfection of humans." Executive producer Bob Singer, p.25

"Clearly Castiel does things that he doesn't want to do or doesn't enjoy, but he does it because he's an angel, and angels follow their orders from Heaven." Tobin, p.25

"With the visual effects we try to determine what's actually happening. Like, !!! when an angel gets her grace, what is that? In essence, it's like she's being reborn. So we started it in her womb and had this nuclear reactor type of thing that built up, and when it got too big for her body to contain, it blew up." Hayden, pp.63-64

"When Uriel gets stabbed, we're inside and you cut outside and there's a matte painting that we did where the light comes exploding out the window. On top of that we'd framed it to allow for a big brick smokestack that crumbled and broke apart as it came down, but it was one of those things that in the end the producers just sort of felt, 'Well, it's a little bit more than we wanted. We love it and think it looks great, but it isn't necessary for the episode.' It'd make that shot be a big production value piece when it's just a footnote in what's happening story-wise. Then !!! you immediately go inside to this high wide shot of the wings painted on the floor, so it didn't hurt at all not to have it." Hayden, pp.90-91

Protection by archangels... "We made that up completely. We needed a way to get Sam out from under Lilith, so we asked ourselves, 'How can we get Castiel to give Dean a nudge and a wink without actually disobeying orders, which were not to interfere? It was just a clever write around to get Sam out of that mess." Siege, p.104

"'He goes to the angels' dry cleaner' is the joke we always make. We don't want to get hung up on the fact that things happen to him and it stays that way. In some instances we've played the damage out for a little bit, but then it disappears if it doesn't make sense for the story." ???, p.109

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7AHa2-nwk&feature=relmfu

I don't quite understand how the wardrobe works because I get shot and the clothes are torn by the bullets and a knife goes through them, and then they heal magically. The clothes themselves heal. So I think that angels have some sort of superpower of mending and drycleaning automatically, which is nice.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-Questions-Answered-1002240.aspx

What is the difference (besides what I guess you could call their "political" affiliations") between the angels and demons? I ask because their policies seem to be pretty similar: Both sides are into possessing humans; both sides are into destroying large numbers of humans and both sides are willing to do extreme measures with no regard for the suffering of others to achieve their objectives. — MrKWoodmaid Gamble: Their methods are often eerily similar, huh? I find that pretty interesting. One big difference is that demons used to be human. Angels never were. Demons may have lost their humanity, but it could be argued that angels never had it to begin with. But: It's not entirely true that angels have no regard for the suffering of humans. Castiel is clearly troubled by it. Anna was so compelled by humans that she chose to fall. You've got to take angels on a case-by-case basis.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-Questions-Answered-1001976.aspx

Gamble: Our angels aren't "angelic" in the porcelain doll sense. They're warriors, and they behave like it. It can be pretty jarring; it certainly was to Sam and Dean. As for whether or not they were "for sure" sent by God ... it seems to me that on our show, there's been a good rule of thumb so far: Evil is a certainty. But good is not as easy to pin down. It requires a certain amount of faith.

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/10/supernatural-ca.html

I think that these angels are at least loosely derived from some Biblical angel stories, and those angels are [very tough]. They just destroy. I picked up Revelations, and they destroy, they destroy, they destroy. There’s no mention of cherubs and harps or any of that.