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Originally Posted by Huinesoron
I'm not sure about that; I think it makes the flaws in my art too obvious, while keeping it softer just looks stylised.
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Yeah, ignore everything I said before. I like the stylized art over the backdrops - and I like the first version over the contrasty version, though I can't quite see what the difference is. I like how it looks in the videos, and I agree that it's a smoother look than the melange of media.
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Originally Posted by Hui
Thingol and Melian are very close to the hand-drawn versions, I'm happy with them (and Melian's dress has a nice glow to it). Galadriel... her face is a mess, I need to revisit. But otherwise I quite like her? Her costume is simple, but it's meant to be.
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Yay! The Feanor Bros and Doriat Duo look fantastic. I see what you're saying about Galadriel - her costume is very nice, but something is up with her face. Is that something you can easily edit now that she's a computer-drawn image?
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Originally Posted by Huinesoron
Tell me, Heather, tell me the truth... // Give me the words! Or take your final beat...
After literal years of work on both our parts, I am positively flipping delighted to be able to share Finrod-Zong: Act 1. From the shores of Valinor to the forests of Brethil, by way of Doriath, Nargothrond, and points in between, our heroes (and villains) clock up almost an hour of singing and what's technically known as A Whole Bunch of pictures and music.
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This is so flipping awesome and I absolutely had to watch this the first opportunity I had. I missed these videos so much when they were down. And now they are a ruuuun!
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Originally Posted by Hui
I'm happy with the "Neo" pictures; they could be better, but so could anything in this baffling project. My guess is that our final state will be a single huge video plus individual ones for each song, so this is still an intermediate state - but at least it finally looks like the finished thing.
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I'm on the same page there with the vision for a final state.
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Originally Posted by Hui
It's also useful for checking the audio balance. Right away I noticed that Finrod is too loud (on headphones) in the Lament, and I'm pretty sure different songs are coming in at different volumes. That's simple to address, and this lets us spot it. (You can also look at your "background music" question; it's outside my competence I'm afraid.)
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Agree. Finrod is a touch too loud in Lament, Luthien could stand to be quieter in Meeting. And yes, the songs are totally different volumes and that is partially my fault - something like Dream is all written in the mezzo's and pianos, while Oath volumes range from forte to fortissimo. The former would need to be Audacity fixes, but the latter could perhaps just be audio file volume adjustment? If it comes to it, the latter isn't so bad, so if it's difficult to fix I do wonder if it would be tolerable.
And
headphones... The bane of my existence. I do all my work with a set of those, and depending on which ones I use it sounds
really different. At some point I decided to calibrate all the music to my slightly better quality but uncomfortable to wear set. The issue is it tends to emphasize sounds differently. I've listened to the run with my comfortable earphones, and the music sounds kinda bad when I pay attention to it, but that's because I'm used to hearing it in the good set. Maybe I should have calibrated for the cheap ones from the beginning? But then the cheap ones keep breaking on me and need replacement every couple months... Blergh.
Headphone trouble aside, I think it sounds pretty good! It does make me wanna bump up the urgency of remaking Doriath though. You sing a fantastic Thingol, but even that doesn't cover up how much of an ugly sore the music and Melian's piece is, especially on the background of the other songs. If we redo that, we will have a presentable Act 1. ^.^
Thinking about the gaps between songs, I actually thought most of them could do with allowing a bit more reflective silence in between. I think the intros help mitigate the "awkward silence" at the start, they create the ambient mood-setting background noise in the beginning. And in between the songs there can be a bit of a pause to let the impact hang for a bit (especially for pieces like Ballad to Amarie and Aria). The one exception is the pause between Lament and Oath, which I thought was a bit draggy, and then Oath kinda started playing out of nowhere. I wonder if it makes sense to overlap their audio/visuals - put the Oath tower at the end of the protracted outro for Lament, so that when that last note finally dies it's already set up to begin playing Oath without much of a pause? I don't know how difficult that's gonna be though. Maybe just shortening the pause would be fine.
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Originally Posted by Hui
Unrelated to Act 1, I also have a translation question: both Luthien and Galadriel sing "Love is the only law that counts", in the Showdown and the Epilogue. My question is: could they mean "Love is the only Oath that counts"? It feels like it would be more thematically linked with the Zong and the Lay.
Actually, back in Act 1 we have a few instances of "love indeed knows no rules". Could it be something like "love is bound by no rules/laws/oaths" instead? It's always sounded kind of weird for such a key line, and "bound" would be a nice word for something based on the Release from Bondage.
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Luthien
does sing "love is the only oath", and I thought we had it as such in the Showdown already. In Sons of Feanor, she sings about "a different law in this world".
Galadriel in Epilogue sings "firmer than steel and fetters, stronger than oaths and above words, the only law - love itself". She repeats: "And if this new world is such that in it the Law is Love itself"... ekh, grammatically weird when you keep it literal, but basically she sticks with "law".
Back in Act 1 Finrod sings twice about "love knows no rules", which is pretty literal. I believe it's "Oh would that in this world love knew of no rules" in Ballad, and "I see at last that love indeed knows no rules" in Camp. Rules, in both languages.
They all use different language in the original, but indeed there is a running theme conceptually through all of their songs. I don't know if I agree with changing all the Law's to Oath's; I think the meaning is a little different, and they are not mutually exclusive statements. "Rules" makes sense too, and it's an existing expression, and it adds another flavour of meaning that makes sense for Finrod in particular - not that Love is the ultimate force in the universe but that it doesn't recognize logical constraints and can overcome them in spite of petty things like Time and Sea and Oaths and whatever else; I see his statement as an affirmation that he has faith his and Amarie's love can rekindle in spite of all the "technical difficulties". I don't think he's quite at the point where he would declare Love to be the
only oath (after all, he's on a quest to fulfil his oath to Barahir), nor the chief driving force of the universe (or the Duel would have been a repeat of Showdown). Luthien says both Oath and Law, because personally for her this is the one loyalty from which she cannot be swerved, and she recognized that she is being moved and powered by a force that she has no control over. Galadriel says Law as she is reflecting on the way of the world, the big cogwheels that make history move, the foundations that the world rests upon. I am not opposed to having them all say different things, I think they have a different flavour in their respective contexts. And I think they were written with this in mind - though it's obvious that there is a recurring theme, they were not written to say identical things throughout. I am not sure though what you meant at the end with "bound". Changing just Finrod's part?