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Day 6 of Zutara Week (@zutaraweek) 2022: Closeness

i present to you… Katara healing Zuko post-Agni Kai amidst a light drizzle of ash.

Art inspired by Kept in Cages by @sweet-s0rr0w

this is a very belated part 2 to my @hd-wireless reveal!

I actually worked through a design brief and several mockups and ideas before settling on this one.

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

Hi, thank you kindly ✨ I'm glad you like them.

Because I'm working with such a small word count (50/100 words) most of the time, my process is like this:

If it's a song prompt, I'll scan the lyrics and see if anything jumps out at me. If there's just a word, I'll do some word association including idioms. Unless I have an idea right away, I'll let it marinate for a while and I like it to be a little less straightforward, so sometimes I'll go to a poem or lyrics. I want a vibe or a line.

I start drafting in wordcounter.net. Usually because of how long my sentences are, this is 3 - 4 sentences, so dialogue has to be kept to a minimum or it's all dialogue. Very rarely, it works right away. Sometimes I write until the end and the final sentence is the only one that works. Sometimes the idea shifts as I write it. Most of the time, I put it aside and look at it again in 10-15 minutes. I don't throw away anything I write, so if the idea really isn't working, I throw it in a doc for potential future use and try again from another angle.

Practice! My first microfic was very basic and didn't do what I wanted at all. I try to use a combo of structure, interesting word choice, and sparse detail to get where I need to go. I know what won't work a lot better now then when I started, and I'm better able to use ambiguity as a tool, because I just don't have the word count to explain everything. If I have a fair approximation of what I wanted, mission accomplished.

More generally, sometimes I write microfic as an interesting craft challenge and sometimes I really want to try something out, and very rarely it's the jumping off point for something longer. But I enjoy it and that's why I continue.

I drew this lilac for a different reason, but for 25 of May it fits perfectly

All the little angels rise up high!

“Range Life” by Jordan Bolton