Former Oklahoman plays role in video game industry
J.R.R. Tolkien fans know the magic of Middle-earth is in the details.
No one is more familiar with those details than Utah composer Chance Thomas, who grew up in Oklahoma City.
Since 1998, Thomas has composed scores for 10 computer and video games (three unreleased) based on Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
“Tolkien had spent a lot of time thinking about the way his world sounded,” Thomas said in a recent phone interview. “He spends a lot of ink describing musical instruments the various races use, the songs that were sung, the various emotions that were conjured up by the music and the lyrics.
“I wanted to become expert on how music in Middle-earth is supposed to sound based on the literature and intelligent inferences I could make based on that information. Thus began a multiyear project of pulling out, understanding and collating every sound and musical note.”
He collected his notes in his “Tolkien Music Sound Guide” and has used them as the basis of his scores ever since.
His scores are featured in several video game titles, including a few that borrow their names directly from Tolkien. They include “The Hobbit,” “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers,” “War of the Ring” and three “Lord of the Rings Online” games. The most recent, subtitled “Riders of Rohan,” was released last year to acclaim from critics and gamers.
The Rohan soundtrack is available on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify.
Thomas’ connection to gaming began in 1996. Several years earlier, Thomas had graduated from Brigham Young University
loose fitting clothing and standing on stage talking. It even captures her departure; the craft rolls along the grass before launching into the sky like a huge, ungainly insect.
Updating images
For the past year, Ayers and colleague Diane Wasser have been going through the video collections, converting some of the 12 million linear feet of film into high-definition footage. Each reel of 8 mm and 16 mm film also is saved as a smaller digital file and uploaded to the Historical Society’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/ OHSfilm).
There you can see Earhart’s Oklahoma City visit and a wealth of other clips. The channel is home to about 320 films documenting Oklahoma’s past.
Among them are some classic moments from “The Ida B Show,” a longrunning magazine-style program on KOCO-5.
The show starred Ida B. Blackburn, who is the mother of Oklahoma Historical Society Director Bob Blackburn.
“We found in her collection a rare Beach Boys interview,” Ayers said. “It’s blowing up on the Internet. It shows Brian Wilson playing at Springlake, which was a little old amusement park in Oklahoma City. … We put it up on YouTube five days ago, and it’s got about 2,000 hits already.”
There’s no audio with the clip of the Beach Boys’ performance, but there is sound with Ida B’s interview of brothers and bandmates Brian and Carl Wilson.
The collection also includes interviews with entertainer Frankie Avalon, Western star John Wayne and musical group Herman’s Hermits.
Other popular clips include a 1966 interview of Oklahoma author Ralph Ellison and a promotional film from the 1960s — titled “Growing With Pride” — that champions Okla- homa City’s urban renewal. (Today many mourn that period in the city’s history, which drove residents from downtown and saw landmark buildings bulldozed in the name of progress.)
Everyday people occupy much of the footage.
The Warren T. Basore collection, for instance, consists of home movies shot from 1959 to 1978. Shots of unidentified people inside unknown homes or buildings aren’t all that helpful for historical researchers, but the Basore films include footage of Oklahoma City and Tulsa neighborhoods.
“They really help people doing research on fashions, locations and events,” Ayers said.
The YouTube clips are good enough for most people, he said, but television networks, documentarians and those with special interest in particular shots may access the high-definition versions by appointment.
High-def files consume immense quantities of memory; in the past year alone, Ayers and Wasser have filled hard drives with seven terabytes of data.
The work isn’t easy. Damaged film must be sent out for repair or trimmed and spliced.
“It’s a kind of slow, deliberate process. ... Processing and archiving is not a real speedy thing, but it’s big to us because some of these things haven’t been seen since the 1920s,” Ayers said. “This is the first time, with today’s technology, that these are being seen. It’s pretty amazing.”