Welcome to the diary update for May 2022! Ever since October I have been working on the transition to video format for the website. It has taken longer than I wanted (and expected) but it’s finally over! From the dozens of pages with text, images, and audio, to only four pages: People, Societies, Places, and Objects. Let’s look at the present and future of Music of Ice and Fire in more detail!
The New Chapters
Creating the format was a real toil but then having to keep making changes and updates as I went over each and every piece I added to the file almost did me in. More times than I dare to admit I would finish working on a page and then realize how much better it would look if I used a different layout or changed the style of the animations. Then it would bug me until I made the changes, which meant going back and redoing so much stuff it would take me weeks to get back to where I was. But at least today I can say I feel satisfied with the results. Right now the total running time for all 4 videos (aka chapters) is 90 minutes long. The longest videos are by far People and Societies, with the new chapters Places and Objects only a few pieces long; although the idea is to keep updating the videos with more videos even if it is slowly. The good news is that they are least published and the website looks and feels closer to the way wanted it to be in terms of content and presentation; not great, not terrible.
Back to Writing
And so now I can finally go back to writing music. Before today, every time I wanted to sit and write some new music I couldn’t do it. I knew that if I went back to writing music even for one day I’d not want to go back to finishing the template so I had to finish it. But now the wait is over and I look at my piano with new eyes: today I sat down at the piano for the first time in months with nothing on my mind except enjoying coming back to it, and after having gotten over the fact that 6 months without playing have made me rustier than I’d want to admit, I know I’ll get back into my old piano routine in no time. I’m looking at the hundreds of themes I want to write for characters, societies, places, and objects and I’m filled with joy. At last!
For the rest of the year I want to do nothing but add more themes to the chapters, although the process from “idea” to “website” will take longer than it used to. Before it was a two step process: Writing the theme at the piano and rendering the audio file with Finale. The first one would take however long, from a hours to months. The second one would never take longer than a weekend. Now there is the new third step of adding a page to the book. And this is sadly a long step; definitely longer than the second, but it is what it is. So expect new themes coming to the website but beware it won’t be a torrent of new pieces. For now I want to keep adding characters of the great houses of Westeros, especially Targaryen, Greyjoy, Martell, Arryn, before I move on to secondary houses and so on so forth.
And all of this while I resume my studies as a visual artist, which I also put aside to complete the videos, but I haven’t given up on the idea of illustrating the videos with drawings and paintings of my own. But more on that another day. I hope to see you in next month’s diary!
Music of Ice and Fire 