i don’t feel like i’m old enough to be my age
if i can get enough losers to do this with me, we can have like whatever the gothic lolitas do, tea parties?? but it can be a lan party and we’re all dressed like shit and blasting midi covers
I wish my friends would take random pictures of me when we hang out because I’m an arrogant prick and I want more pictures of myself that aren’t selfies.
Most composers spend just 10-12ish weeks working on a film’s music. John Williams spent around 14 weeks on each Star Wars movie, 40ish weeks total for the whole OT……but composing the LOTR trilogy’s soundtrack took four years
The vocals you hear in the soundtrack are usually in one of Tolkien’s languages (esp. Elvish). The English translations of the lyrics are all poems, or quotes from the book, or occasionally even quotes from other parts of the films that are relevant to the scene
When there were no finished scenes for him to score, Howard Shore would develop musical themes inspired by the scripts or passages from the book. That’s how he got all Middle-Earth locations have their own unique sound: he was able to compose drafts of “what Gondor would sound like” and “what Lorien would sound like” long before any scenes in those places were filmed
Shore has said his favorite parts to score were always the little heartfelt moments between Frodo and Sam
Shore wrote over 100 unique leitmotifs/musical themes to represent specific people, places, and things in Middle Earth (over 160 if you count The Hobbit)
The ones we all talk about are the Fellowship theme, the main Shire Theme, and the themes for places like Gondor, Mordor, Rohan, and Rivendell…but a lot of the more subtle ones get overlooked and underappreciated
Like Aragorn’s theme. It’s a lot less “obvious” than the others because, like Aragorn himself, it adapts to take on the color of whatever place Aragorn is in: it’s played on dramatic broody stringed instruments in Bree, on horns in battle scenes, softly on the flute with Arwen in Rivendell….
Eowyn has not just one but three different leitmotifs to represent her
Gollum and Smeagol both have their own leitmotifs! Whose theme music is playing in the scene can often tell you whether the Gollum or Smeagol side is “winning” at the moment
The melody for Gollum’s Song in the end credits of the The Two Towers is the Smeagol and Gollum themes smushed together (it’s Symbolic)
And then there’s the really obscure ones. Like there’s a melody that plays at Boromir’s death that shows up again in ROTK in scenes that foreshadow a major death or loss
Wikipedia actually has a list of these leitmotifs, click this link and scroll down to check it out if you’re bored
Shore wanted the theme music to grow alongside the characters– so that as the characters changed, their theme music would change with them.
You can hear that most clearly in the Shire theme. Like the hobbits, it goes through A Lot
Like compare the childish lil penny whistle theme you hear in Concerning Hobbits/the beginning of FOTR with (throws a dart at random Beautiful Tragic Hobbit Character Development scene because there WAY TOO MANY to choose from) the scene when Pippin finds Merry on the battlefield, where you hear a kind of shattered and broken but more mature version of that same theme in the background
I could write you a book on how much I love the way the Shire theme grows across the course of these films
Unlike the hero’s themes, which constantly change and grow, the villain’s themes (The One Ring theme, the Isengard theme, etc) remain basically the same from the very beginning of FOTR to the end of ROTK. Shore said this was an intentional choice: to emphasize that evil is static, while good is capable of change
Shore has said that between all the music that made into the movies and the music that didn’t, he composed enough for “a month of continuous listening”……..where can I sign up
bruh
(inspired by)
when you draw a face, but you never bothered to get the body right first.
With all this talk about how Super Mario Odyssey’s mechanics are great, but its world designs are cliché, I’ve gotta wonder: what’s left? Like, how do you design themed platformer worlds without falling into cliché if you’re not allowed to have:
a world set in a forest, in a desert, at the beach, amid the clouds or on the Moon;
a world themed after fire, ice, water, castles, food, flowers or ghosts;
a world characterised by ancient ruins, modern cities, or giant machines
… and so forth? The game goes so far as to have you fight a damn Dark Souls boss at one point, and even that’s been described as predictable tonal break.
I think we’re reaching a point where we’re going to have to stop expecting novelty for novelty’s sake in open-world platformer design, simply because nearly every reasonable world theme has already been done by someone, somewhere.
Stuff I like that I reblog, and stuff that I post .... Luke
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