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Hello everyone and welcome to decodingtv covering the Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power.

I am David Chen and I'm Don Marshall.

This episode we're going to be discussing season one episode four of The Rings of Power entitled The Great Wave.

We are going to spoil everything through this week's episode, but we will not spoil anything from future weeks

and that includes anything on the next time on preview or anything from the books.

You can always find more episodes of this show in podcastform.podcast.decodingtv.com or find us on youtube at youtube.com slash decodingtv.

Don Marshall, I wanted to talk to you as a follow up about something that we have discussed in previous weeks and that is the opening credits sequence.

We have speculated about what the opening credits sequence meant, what they were about, what they were trying to accomplish,

a variety this week published an article entitled Inside the Secrets of the Rings of Power Title Sequence.

There is apparently a group or an agency called Plains of Yonder that put together the opening sequence.

A lot of it was apparently done practically.

One of the people named Katrina Crawford discusses the creation of the opening title sequence.

She has a PhD in molecular biology and, quote, discovered beautiful combinations when she spread sand out on a tray and paired it with a sound of Gregorian chance.

So she filmed the effect on our iPhone and they continue to experiment with different materials like fungal powder to pigments to learn more about the behavior of different particle sizes and density, as well as how to control the process.

So I'm going to quote here when the time came for the actual filming, they paired sand to varying particle sizes with a single hertz tone from a computer tone generator.

Every frame of the title utilizes this technique and many frames would later be enhanced or cleaned up with CGI to achieve a finished product that represents a world created through song.

I skip ahead a little bit. The title is not the title sequence is not all random.

In addition to diamonds and swirls, there are mountains, trees, islands and continents, and there are rings nine in one frame, three in another numbers played an important role in Tolkien's work and Crawford and be sure wanted to honor this while hinting at events set within and beyond the second age in which rings of power is set.

So anyway, I thought you'd appreciate that little tidbit about that is nice.

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