#also last art post before july. i need to finish my commissions and prepare for AF | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mirukimary · 1 year

Text

My Art Summary for 2022!

(Under the cut I'll go into more details for each month, for memory's sake. Warning: It's LONG.)

Come one, come all for your opportunity to see all of the drawings I should have posted but never did! The ones that make me work harder every december to remember when tf i drew what! The ones that, in missing, make it seem like i only draw once a year--! (going through my twitter media tab is depressing LMAO)

JANUARY

[Pictured: Iola in Prenda clothing. There was a Twitter Post going around asking you to draw your WoL in your country's traditional clothes. Ofc I didn't skip the opportunity to do it! And drew my BF's WoL too for good measure. Still my fav drawing of the year!]

Also worked on a VTuber model for a friend (i drew it as a bust january last year; then this year was asked to expand it to full body). It was very challenging, but also fun!

For the rest, I designed some backstory NPCs for Asera (Daimyorus childhood friend, his goddess and a mage that helped us multiple times); and drew some twitch emotes for a client. Was a fresh, fun start. I remember having a lot of fun and finding that month quite relaxing.

(Goddess Rondra, Mage Rupin & elf-friend Pedro (RIP))

FEBRUARY

[Pictured: My friend's bunny boi~]

Further work was done on the VTuber model, a lot of parts that weren't quite working before were redrawn. He was taking form!! Now that most of the work was done, also did a ref sheet to go with it. I couldn't wait to see him moving!

That's when I started preparing to open commissions for realz, trying to think of prices and set up examples. I drew some BGs and the Complexity Guide, and set most of the boring things up. I plan to open comms either Jan 2023 or February 2023, so let's hope all the work paid off~

MARCH

[Pictured: 'Smile at the Blue Skies', or "Fuq i need a bust sketch ref for my commission examples page". Sounds a bit less dreamy now, huh? LMAO]

But yeah, most of the month was dedicated to the VTuber model, working to fix it as the rigger found issues. Ref Sheet was finished this month. I'll stop mentioning the model, but the back and forth lasted till june or so?? Had to fix all of his toggles; and redraw his entire hair to allow for a better 3D effect when moving (it went from 3~6 layers to over 20). This was my first time working on vtuber models, so there was A LOT to learn. It surprising how many pitfalls there is in vtuber making. I'm very proud of how it turned out, and eternally grateful to the rigger (and to my friend) for being so patient with me. I was sent a small demo of what he looks like, and seeing your drawing move so beautifully like that feels magical!! There's still much to design and draw before he can debut, but hope you can support him then!

Oh yeah, there was this attempt too:

APRIL

[Pictured: 'With Friends' the commission I worked on through March and April. Extra special because that's my friend & his pets there!]

Also sketched some ideas for illustrations of our RP characters (hi Irene), but never really completed them:

It feels so long since I made these... Double checked like 3 times to make sure it wasn't April 2021 LMAO

I REALLY want to revisit some of these now.

MAY

[Pictured: #XIVARTBASH drawing, featuring Nero.]

Also drew the catgirl from Love2DrawManga. Didn't do much this month (...or did but forgot). I believe I worked on some BGs I can't show, but these are still very much stuck at WIP :(

JUNE

[Pictured: Nia's WoL, Mat. Just a smol gift for someone that brings a lot of joy to FFXIV Twitter.]

So... I completelly forgot I was drawing my OCs outfits [facepalm]:

(Don't mind the two in the corner, I don't want my essay to get hit with Tumblr hammer LMAO They're nowhere near done). But yeah, these are my OCs from 'Elder''. I've had them since childhood, and still love them, even if I gave up on the book idea. Will make an actual post once all is done and I can go back to their character illusts uwu

JULY

[Pictured: Cade from 'Still Shining'. Working on this was an amazing experience~ Won't go on detail bc I already did, but still glad for the experience!]

Instead I'll talk about... Art Fight month!!!

SO.MUCH.FUN

I'm 100% going back next year! This event just proved how much I love drawing people's OCs. I really want to be a commission artist so I can do that for a living. Sadly I didn't get to draw everyone I wanted, plus I wasted a lot of time trying to look through OCs while the website was dying LMAO Next year I'll come prepared!

Also I drew that Spring picture to use as a reference in her profile there. I missed drawing her!

AUGUST

[Pictured: Commission for 'Under Maintenance'.]

Mostly worked on commemorative stuff. Anniversary chibi for Brie; that Under Maintenance pic; Thank You for DL message for 'Loving You Fully' and 'Still Shining'. Also designed some outfits (and painted some sprites) for Mythic Meetup: Midnight Mystery (not released yet!).

Started a bday gift for my boyfriend, but something kept looking 'off' about it so I didn't finish in time. Turns out it was overblended... And will require a redraw. Sorry boyfriend TT But my wife (tm) needs to look perfect!!

Also made the design for our new RP characters:

(mine is the not-cat girl, obviously)

...And I belive this is when I made that cursed Yshtola feeding Zero picture? Yeah.

SEPTEMBER

[Pictured: Witch Torunn]

Made the YCH bases, as well as 3 examples. I have no memories of this month, but Windows says this sketch is from september:

OCTOBER

[Pictured: Old OC redraw, for my Commission Guide. Decided to do it after a client asked for clarification if an old drawing was halfbody or fullbody (august last year, Torunn sitting down).]

They're really old OCs of mine. Ever RP-ed in Deviantart groups? I did!!

Cecilia (<-) is pretty much a Iola prototype: salve maker and potion seller who lives with her dad (who taught her the craft). One day he collapses during work, and Cecilia ends up overworking herself to afford his medicine and other living expenses. In desperation, she joins The Guild as a novice magician for money, and gets herself involved on a war she never intended to join.

Celticca (->) is a archer and aspiring musician who wants to make the most beautiful song (tm) for her family. She's very sweet, but naïve and scatterbrained. I didn't have much planned for her, but had a lot of fun seeing her constantly get involved with Evil/Neutral alligned characters w/o noticing LOL

....Now that I think about it, she's literally a FFXIV bard, before I knew anything about XIV.

The rest of October was focused on Magni's Birthday Project and my YCH Halloween Commissions.

...And THIS:

Halloween pictures of our current RP characters \O/ To go with our halloween session~ Also drew these two for our halloween one-shot:

Ellie (<-) and Hadrianus (->). Ellie is a yandere witch I made as a joke and fell in love with. Hadrianus is my BF's wizard. Yes, he looks like Dr. Strange. Yes, that's the joke. The 3rd character was Rosemary, but I didn't ask to draw her so she's missing :( I do want to draw all of them at some point. We accidentally made "Spy x Family, but it's horror and Loid wants to run away" LOOOL I love this trio!!

Made 2 adoptables, but since they went unsold I decided to remove them and redraw for next year:

(The neutral pose doesn't help them stand out ^^;; Sorry bbys)

Also sketched Julio from Atelier Sophie~

(Hoping to finish it early next year. He's not the only idea I had while playing, but other stuff took priority"")

October was so much fun!! Sadly it let me completely drained by the end of it. I got hit with such a HUGE art block it was like my hands just... Forgot how to draw. Everything came out weird. Sadly, that resulted on me having to drop a drawing I was making for Brie :/ Hoping I can pick it back up soon... (better late than never right?)

It's around that time I decided to work on an AI redraw. Used Crayon (old Dall-e Mini) to create some monstrosity for me and tried to turn it into an actual drawing.

The monstrosity:

The Work In Porgress:

This drawing is a bit painful to look at, because of all the self doubt and bad feelings attached to it. But I want to finish it someday. My prompt was something stupid like 'cute anime girl having fun'. I want to remain true to the prompt and make her meeting with lil ladybug feel warm and fun!

...Like of the feelings I was missing back then, and am just now starting to get back.

TL;DR: Take breaks or you'll break.

NOVEMBER

[Pictured: Chibi Adra for Kyou.]

Managing burnout through most of it. Eventually just decided to stop fighting and played games instead. Even with the frame drops, Atelier Ryza is pretty fun~ Hoping to go bk to it soon.

At some point my boyfriend said I should just draw things to have fun for a bit. I followed his advice...

DECEMBER

[Pictured: Art Party (DracoLunari's WoL)]

...By drawing Iola as a sheep herder. It was much more fun than it sounds. I didn't care for polish at all, just seeing Iola in a cute outfit LMAO It's... A mess of a drawing. But it's MY mess of a drawing. I feel this thought calmed my mind a lot.

Also went for my first ever Art Party. It was fun, tho brain did get in the way after a bit, as expected ^^;;; Still want to go to these more often!! It's fun to draw & chat with others.

For random drawings, all I have is a(n embarrassing) fanart of Elf from Isekai Ojisan. I'll post eventually..... (that anime is hilarious)

For now I have a commission and a collab to take care of, and a certain Moon Goddess to draw as soon as possible~ Will be doing my best these next few days, and hope Iola can be my sheperd and guide me to the path of 'having lots of fun drawing again'.

ONWARDS TO 2023...

May my year be filled with bad drawings that I love;

And good drawings I'm proud of.

May your year give you the same

And everything else you wish for!

Thanks @/Taxkha on twitter for the Template!

#maryart #art summary 2022 #it's a wall of text #but i feel i'd regret it it any other way #happy holidays all

5 notes · View notes

queenofcarrots · 5 years

Text

Manuscripts in Star Wars (And Star Wars Fan Fiction)

This is the text of a talk originally presented at the conference Fan Cultures and the Premodern World at Oxford University in July, 2019, organized by Dr. Juliana Dresvina of the Oxford History Faculty. This presentation represents a collaboration between myself and Dr Brandon Hawke of Rhode Island College, and is essentially a summation of our video project Sacred Texts: Codices Far, Far Away, (Introduction to the series at that link) and examples below will include links to brief conversations where Brandon and I talk about the examples in a bit more detail. This has also been posted on my academic blog but I’m cross-posting here to reach a different audience.

Hi, My name is Dot Porter, and I want to start by thanking Juliana for the wonderful organization of this conference, and also for including me in the program. This is very different from the kind of conference I normally present at – in my day job I’m a special collections curator at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in medieval manuscripts, their digitization, and their post-digital lives. Basically I get paid to digitize medieval manuscripts and then play with them. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which is just finished, and through which we digitized and made available for reuse more than 465 codices from institutions in Philadelphia)

Aside from my family there are two things in life I adore: medieval manuscripts, and Star Wars. I must admit that while I am a scholar of manuscripts, of a sort, I am also a fan. I love manuscripts – the way they look, feel, smell; I love to hold a manuscript and think about all the other people who have touched it, and consider the signs of use that imply their long histories. This interest has led to current work on conceiving of medieval manuscripts as transformative works themselves, first presented at Leeds 2018 and work I’m continuing looking specifically as Books of Hours. (My original draft of this presentation featured some of this work, but it threatened to take over, so I axed it all; a blog post of my Leeds paper is on my blog, if you’re curious).

While I am arguably a manuscript scholar, I am most definitely not a scholar of fandom studies – you will, I’m sure, find my theory wanting – nor am I a scholar of Star Wars, but I am a fan. I do the things that fans do. I’m on Tumblr, although that platform is pretty dead now, and I have a fandom Twitter account, which is much more active. I write and consume fan fiction, and I regularly commission artwork to illustrate my stories and stories I would like to write. I have written exactly one notable meta, which was even picked up by the AV Club – they actually cited me, unlike many of the other websites, which only cited the person who stole my work and posted it on Reddit!

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, released in December 2017, we were introduced, for the first time, to manuscripts in the Star Wars universe. I had avoided trailers and spoilers, so the first time I saw this was in the theater, and I was, as the kids say, shooketh. Not only one manuscript, but a whole shelf-full of them! And they’re important. Rey, our heroine, has been sent to the island of Ahch-to to bring Luke Skywalker back to help the Resistance, led by Luke’s sister General Leia Organa, defeat the First Order. Rey has been there for a day or so, following Luke around, making no headway, when she is called to the Uneti tree, a large, hollow, Force-sensitive tree that houses these manuscripts. It’s in the company of these books that Rey and Luke finally communicate with each other, when Rey admits that she has only recently come to the Force and that she needs Luke to train her to be a Jedi, and when Luke grudgingly agrees to give her some lessons, but also tells her that the Jedi must die. Exciting stuff, and the books are there to hear it.

According to Star Wars The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary, Luke Skywalker scoured the galaxy for these texts and collected them himself, storing them in the tree that we see in the film. So these texts weren’t originally all in one collection, they are from many different planets, potentially written in ten different places, ten different times, ten different languages and alphabets, although there’s only one we ever see in the film. The starwars.com blog post “Inside the Lucasfilm Archives: The Jedi Texts” gives us an up-close look at the prop book that was shown in the film; as you can see it’s a real book, written and bound, and even damaged. There are manuscripts in our collection at Penn that look not very unlike this book. It is a real manuscript.

This is one manuscript in the universe. What else do we know about manuscripts in star wars in general? To be honest: not much. But we do know that it is rare to write by hand (as opposed to writing with digital technology like data pads). In Claudia Gray’s novel Bloodlines, which takes place six years before The Last Jedi, Leia Organa is preparing for a fancy party when she finds a handwritten note at her seat, and she’s shocked: “Virtually nobody wrote any longer; it had been years since Leia had seen actual words handwritten in ink on anything but historical documents.” So it appears that, by the time the current films take place, there are no longer manuscripts being actively written in the galaxy, or at least it’s very rare.

Interestingly there is one character in the Sequel Trilogy who it is suggested knows how to write by hand: Kylo Ren, formerly Ben Solo. There is a scene – the same scene is actually shown three times, from three different points of view – where a young padawan Ben is sleeping and his Uncle, Luke Skywalker, comes to him and looks into his head, sensing great darkness in his dreams. Ben calls his lightsaber to either attack his uncle or defend himself against him, depending on the version of the scene, and in one of these shots we can see that he has a calligraphy set in his bedroom. We can see the set here, in a screenshot of his desk just before he calls his lightsaber over – which knocks over the pen and inkwell and jar of parchment scrolls in the process – and in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

What else do we know about these specific books? There is concept art in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi; including six internal pages and six shots of the bindings.

I remember looking at the concept art and thinking how alike and different they were from the manuscripts I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Penn, and I discovered that my Twitter mutual Brandon Hawke, an Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College, was having many of the same thoughts that I was. So in October of 2018, Brandon came down to Penn and we sat for hours in front of a green screen and talked about manuscripts and Star Wars, comparing books in the Penn collections to what we see of the manuscripts in the concept art. We’ve been posting snippets of our discussions on the Schoenberg Institute YouTube channel, and there’s a link at the top there if you want to check them out. So for most of the rest of this paper I’ll be walking through some of the possible comparisons between real manuscripts and the Star Wars manuscripts. I want to stress that we did this for fun, and not for science, and that we’re limited by the collections at Penn and by our own knowledge.

Consider yourself warned: The remainder of this presentation is essentially an educated fan, raving.

As far as Brandon and I have been able to determine, this is a previously unknown script in the Star Wars universe. When I saw it my mind immediately went to Ge’ez, shown here in an early 20th century book of Hymns from Ethiopia. There’s something about the blockiness that is just slightly curved, and a few of the letter forms are slightly similar although I don’t think that’s necessarily meaningful. (video)

We also made a comparison with Coptic, which is thinner, more curved, and perhaps a closer match. (video)

For the third example we looked not at the text, but at its layout on the page. We found a similarity with this 16th century collection of Persian poetry, both its illuminated header (similar in aspect to the illuminated blue line of text in the center of the ancient Jedi text) and the framing of the text. (video)

Aside from text, it is clear that the concept art of pages supplied to us here represent astronomical texts. This is really not surprising, considering that in the Star Wars universe we have a galaxy that seems to have been very closely connected, between planets and cultures, for a very long time, and so it makes sense that even the most ancient texts would be concerned with objects in the system – stars and planets and moons – and how they related to and interact with one another. And this is a major concern in medieval astronomical texts, too: these texts illustrate people trying to make sense of the system they live in, in the best way they know.

One of the pages in the jedi texts is the symbol of the Galactic Republic, but placed on some kind of chart, with characters dispersed through the chart and text – perhaps labels – along the outside. We found a similarity with this chart in LJS 57, a 14th century astronomical anthology from Spain. I don’t know exactly what this chart represents but I can tell you that astronomical texts are full of similar charts; it was one of the ways that medieval people made sense of the data they had available to them. (video)

Something similar is happening here, in LJS 449, a 15th century German medical and astronomical miscellany. These charts are perhaps a bit simpler than the Spanish chart, but they have that attractive blue coloring. Both the coloring and the arrangement of data around the circle reminded Brandon and me of the diagrams on this page of the Jedi texts. (video)

The next three slides show diagrams from LJS 26, a mid-13th century copy of Johannes de Sacro Bosco’s, Algorismus and Tractatum de sphaera, an immensely popular text that was copied and translated and commented upon from the time it was written in the early 13th century (it is possible that our copy was written during Sacrobosco’s lifetime) through the 16th century. It is full of diagrams illustrating the movement of the planets, and the sun, and the moon in relation to the earth. I personally find these diagrams most reminiscent of the two pages on the bottom left, although I feel like their organization suggests a sense of scale that is lacking in the medieval diagrams. (video)

Medieval astronomers only had to think about the earth, and the moon, and the sun, and a few other planets. On the other hand, the Star Wars universe operates on a whole other level – a galaxy with countless star systems and planets that aren’t even charted. When I look at these diagrams I see a clever attempt to illustrate scale using the relatively primitive technology of ink and paper in place of the star charts and 3D maps that we see in the films.

On the other hand, there are some really simple 1:1 comparisons to be made, such as this diagram, which pretty clearly illustrates the phases of a moon. (video)

I want to take a quick look at the bindings of these manuscripts, particularly this piece of concept art, which is quite similar to the prop that we see in the film.

This has a fairly standard binding structure, quite similar to LJS 102, the Ethiopic manuscript we looked at earlier, except for the front cover, which is built of three separate pieces that are obviously connected together. In western bindings, if a wooden cover were a composite of multiple pieces, we would expect that to be obscured, as in this late 13th century Catalonian manuscripts (It’s hard to tell, which is the point, but this cover is made of three pieces of wood).

The only example of a cover like this I’ve seen is from the Walters Art Museum, this 14th century Ethiopian Gospel book. The cover was broken and then sewn back together, but this was the result of an accident, not done on purpose.

My colleague Alberto Campagnolo also suggested that it is similar to the Chinese practice of writing on bamboo strips and binding them together, as in this 18th century example.

This is one instance where the artists who created these concepts have done an excellent job with suggesting a manuscript culture – in fact, several manuscript cultures, cultures that use what is available to them. There are two manuscripts here that appear to be bound in decorated tusks, one that has what appear to be shells embedded in a leather binding, and another that might be bound in hairy skin or – I like to think – had the binding grown on it underground. In any case these all suggest books written in different places, perhaps at different times, and as a manuscript scholar I find that fascinating.

Following up on this I wanted to see how the concept of the manuscripts was received by writers of fan fiction. As a fan author myself I have written a few stories featuring the ancient Jedi texts, but given my interests that made sense; I was curious to see what other authors have done with them. I think there’s more extensive work to be done here, but in reading through the 40 or so stories I was able to find (by searching AO3 for ancient jedi texts, and the “jedi text” tag) I discovered not surprisingly that the stories focused on the text of the books, not on their physical appearance (which is at least partially due to fan fiction being a written medium, vs. film being a visual medium) and that there are three main themes that can appear by themselves or be combined:

Rey can read the texts on her own, or she needs help (Kylo Ren, C3PO, Obi Wan Kenobi’s force ghost)

The translation is used to further the story (whether or not it happens)

The texts do something (e.g., magic spells)

What will happen next? Will there be manuscripts in the Rise of Skywalker, the final film in this last trilogy? Of course I hope so, and it seems likely. The Uneti tree was struck by lightning and burned, but Rey took the manuscripts with her (here is a screenshot of a drawer in the Millennium Falcon, at the very end of the film, showing the books clearly safe and tucked away)

and in the Poe Dameron comic #27 we learn that Rey has been working with C3PO to translate the texts.

And there’s also the spectre of Kylo Ren with a calligraphy set; if he had access to these manuscripts when he was studying with Luke Skywalker, it’s possible that he has read and perhaps even annotated some of the books. Only time will tell, and I for one can’t wait for December.

#star wars #meta #manuscripts #ancient jedi texts #jedi texts #medieval manuscripts

484 notes · View notes

sarcastic--fantastic · 5 years

Text

Olympics, Music, Broadcasting And A Sense Of British Pride

This will be a bit different from previous posts, but it’s something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while. This is a story set in the Summer of 2012, and focuses on music, animation and technology used by the BBC in their television programming for the London Olympics.

A Mammoth Preparation

(photo courtesy of LOCOG, photographer unknown)

Let me set the scene - it’s a cold wet Winter in the British Isles, preparations are well under way for the Games of the XXX Olympiad and the XIV Paralympics, more commonly known as the London 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games happening the following year in July. Venues are having their finishing touches added to them, the London Mayor’s office is planning transport links for the huge surge in visitors, athletes are training in their home countries to get ready for the Games and the BBC are laying out their plans for television and radio coverage. Before anything kicked off, the hype was big enough in the UK that they even made a mockumentary about organising the Games.

I don’t work in media (yet), I certainly don’t work in the BBC but I can have an idea about the huge undertaking that broadcasting the Olympic Games (in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s home country and city) must be. And for 2012, the BBC were going full out; they planned to broadcast all 5000 hours of sport across 27 channels including the red button, Sky, Freeview, Freesat and online.

There’s a lot to prepare like: what programming they’re going to have and what features they want to produce and what filming locations they will be at and which presenters and commentators they want and what additional visual and audio equipment they’ll need and all the hundreds of behind the scenes crew that come with that as well as additional systems they need to set up to facilitate such a large amount of television being sent over the airways. And a big chunk of the BBC’s coverage is live which adds a whole layer of complexities.

I could quite easily nerd-out on the audio-visual and broadcasting technicalities the BBC/OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services) set up for the 2012 Olympics like suspending the BBC Parliament channel to make room for more sport and how the Games were broadcast in 3D across the world but that’s not the main focus of this post today.

A Song For The Olympics

The BBC isn’t new to this shindig - they’ve broadcast live coverage of every Summer Olympic Games since 1960. A small but significant part of this coverage is a theme tune and a title sequence, and that’s actually what this post is about.

In November 2011, it was announced that Elbow, an English alternative/indie rock band would compose the soundtrack for the BBC’s Olympic coverage. This is on the back of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games, in which Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn (the musicians behind the British virtual band Gorillaz) produced music and animation for the opening titles.

"This builds on our recent tradition of using great British contemporary artists to deliver our music, as we did with Damon Albarn in 2008; and we reckon Elbow have a unique combination of credibility - hence their Mercury Prize - with a style that can be enjoyed by people of all ages." - Roger Mosely, BBC's Director of London 2012. [source]

"For our music to be sound-tracking it, there was a big feeling of responsibility but also we're just dead proud to be doing it. And strange as well with none of us really being athletic." - Guy Garvey, lead singer of Elbow. [source]

The BBC asked Elbow to come in and consult on composing the soundtrack. It’s reported they said: “if we asked you to do the Olympic theme, what would you do?” Garvey was told he had been invited along because of Elbow's 2008 single One Day Like This (an epic, anthemic, art-rocky track), which has been used on countless sport montages. Garvey replied: “Well, we can give you something similarly rousing. Something anthemic and bold. And we'd put lots of different parts in it for different parts of the coverage.”

And that is just what they did.

First Steps - Elbow (A.K.A. BBC London 2012 Summer Olympics Theme)

(First Steps cover art courtesy of Elbow and the BBC, artist unknown)

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj3_3vvHDwE

Lyrics: https://genius.com/Elbow-first-steps-lyrics

The track isn’t available on Spotify or officially from Elbow due to it being a commission by the BBC (of which royalties were waived in support for charity). Additionally, it was only released as a digital-download through selected retailers, none of which still seem to be selling it. So unfortunately this YouTube rip is the best quality I could find.

“First Steps” by Elbow is an epic 6 minute 21 second lasting tidal wave of sound that hits you with incredible emotion. The anthem was composed in secret by Elbow in Salford over the 2011-2012 Winter and recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and the NovaVox gospel choir in Spring. Although the full version lasts more than six minutes, it was intentionally composed to allow different clips of one or two minutes to be played during montages of winners or losers. Additionally 40, 30 and five second edits along with a title sequence were used throughout the BBC’s London 2012 campaign.

The first bars of it would be aired around the time of the torch relay beginning in May 2012, with the full work revealed near to the Olympic Games opening ceremony. A one-minute edit of the track, accompanied with video sequence (more on that later) was first shown on BBC One during half-time of the UEFA Euro 2012 final on Sunday 1 July 2012. A four-minute edit of the track was premiered on Chris Evans' Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 on Friday 27 July 2012 (the morning of the opening ceremony). It was used in the opening and closing title sequences of BBC Sport’s Olympics coverage on the first and final days of the Olympics as well as throughout the Games.

"It should be just about the most heard piece of music in 2012." - Roger Mosely, BBC's Director of London 2012. [source]

"I've written something called First Steps. The song can be parents looking with pride at their kid walking for the first time, but also those hopes and aspirations - marvelling at what's going on, the human element of it - translates quite well to watching your finest athletes doing their very best." - Guy Garvey, lead singer of Elbow. [source]

It is in my opinion the perfect backdrop to an incredible event and an important time for the country as a whole. It’s so jaw-droppingly powerful and inspiring, it gives me goosebumps every time I listen to it and I have to commend everyone who worked on the track for such an accomplishment of music. Furthermore, Elbow are such nice chaps that they even waived all fees and royalites from digital downloads of the track in support of Children In Need (a BBC charity and annual fundraising telethon).

But this is only half the story, as while the music is incredible and served as brilliant theme/incidental/identity music for BBC Sport throughout their Olympic coverage - they still needed a title sequence.

Stadium UK - Red Bee Media (A.K.A. BBC London 2012 Summer Olympics Title Sequence)

(BBC Olympics 2012 wallpaper courtesy of BBC Sport, artist unknown)

Full Sequence (YouTube rip): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cVrjFlt4hI

Shortened Trailer (original quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ViLiXA0E70

“Stadium UK”, named for the concept (seen in the sequence) of a giant stadium encircling the UK with athletes preparing and competing in a variety of landscapes, was devised by creative agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe Y&R. The animation was created by Passion Pictures and it was produced by Red Bee Media in conjunction with the BBC and Elbow.

The anthemic composition and the accompanying visuals were intended to sum up the achievement of reaching the Olympics, the emotions of those who win and those who do not, and the coming together of the whole country to support the event. The title was inspired by a child of one of the band members of Elbow learning to walk during the composition of the song, symbolising the hope and achievement of the moment.

As previously mentioned, this “trailer for the Olympics” was first shown during the Euro 2012 final and many more times leading up to the Opening Ceremony. It’s hard to get across the collective hype that was being experienced in Britain before the start of the London Olympics, because for a lot of people it would be a once in a lifetime event that simply couldn’t be missed. Olympic fever was really was everywhere you went. In the news, on signposts, in casual workplace conversation, on banners in pubs. To be fair though, us Brits love a big ol’ national celebration, we’d done the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee just a month prior.

“Across the 17 days of the Games, some 24 million viewers watched at least 15 minutes of our Red Button service - and what was particularly gratifying is that all the different sports proved to be a draw for the audience, with each of those 24 'channels' receiving at least 100,000 viewers at some point.” - Ben Gallop, BBC Sport Editor. [source]

I can say with some degree of certainty that this Summer in 2012 was one of the biggest, and uncharacteristically, happiest moments for the country in many years. Many people were still reeling from the 2008 recession, the coalition government was struggling to co-operate following the 2010 general election and resulting hung-parliament and just a year ago many major English towns were something akin to a war-zone during the 2011 riots. The Olympics were a distraction, and the relative importance of sporting contests can be argued, but what can’t be is how much of a mood-lifter it was for much of the population. This title sequence got people excited - it had a major impact as it showcased the best of Britain. It not only reminded people that some of our own athletes are some of the best in the whole world, but that the upcoming Games would be a chance to show the world all of the wonderful, impressive and sometimes strange things about the United Kingdom. And that was something to look forward to.

A Legacy For Decades

(Ellie Simmonds’ golden postbox photo courtsey of Express and Star news)

The impact of the 2012 Olympics continues to this day, mainly in the form of sport centres with signs that say “home of the 2012 Olympic [sport] events” and golden postboxes on the sides of streets emblazoned with the names of winning athletes. The BBC have long since scaled back their broadcasting following the conclusion of the Games although due to the huge and somewhat slightly unexpected huge popularity of their coverage, many features of those Games’ coverage that were being trialled for the first time were implemented in wider usage must faster than they would have been without the Games. Notably; Twitter and social media interaction, live-blogs on the BBC Sport website and additional Red Button live broadcasting, which has been re-used for basically every Wimbledon tennis tournament since.

Elbow’s music hasn’t been entirely forgotten either (I hope this post proves that). I heard it recently during the BBC’s coverage of the annual London Marathon, they’re certainly getting mileage out of it. And why not re-use it for future sporting events, the track’s emotion and feeling is just as applicable to something like the London Marathon as it is to the Olympics. Not mentioned up until now but there was actually an official song for the London 2012 Olympic Games called “Survival”, by another English rock band: Muse. It does deserve a very honourable mention as Muse are a great band and it’s a brilliant song, but it’s very different in style and I would argue is not what people think of when you ask the question “what was the music for the 2012 Olympics?”. There were also two soundtrack albums for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, but these are mainly live cover performances from those ceremonies.

To conclude, the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games were incredible, and I get rather patriotic when talking about them. Bar a few controversies it was largely a huge success. Millions of people who were not able to attend events in person were able to be part of the action thanks to the impeccable British Broadcasting Corporation. Fantastic programming and coverage, great features and analysis and one stellar title sequence and music track. We all know the on-screen presenters but I don’t think the behind-the-scenes crew get nearly enough praise - so personally I would like to say thank you to those hundreds upon hundreds of people who worked thankless tasks so people like me could be a part of one of the greatest events this country’s ever hosted. And thanks to Elbow, for a work of musical genius, that continues to inspire and send chills down the spine of every hopeful athlete or just plain old regular person to this day.