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The Musical Reconstruction of Harry Potter (a WIP)

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 (Edited)

I’d always been intending to use certain themes more consistently throughout the series in my Harry Potter edits. However, this video series has convinced me to go all out. This thread is about assigning meaning to various existing themes to be used more often and developped into proper leitmotifs. Everyone can contribute. There will not be any actual edit for this (unless you count mine, which will vary in far more ways than this). It’s just a resource for faneditors to use. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Existing Connections:
Hedwig’s Theme - Main Theme
Leaving Hogwarts - Friends/Family (I suggest using it throughout the series rather than just in 1&2)
The Face of Voldemort - Voldemort’s Theme (Same here)
A Window to the Past - The Marauders
Fireworks - The Weasley Twins

Proposed Connections:
Fawkes the Phoenix - Dumbledore’s Theme
Fred and George (OotP Game) - Also the Weasley Twins
The Burrow (CoS Game) - The Burrow/The Weasleys (suggested by Harold Flower)

Existing Themes:
Harry’s Wondrous World
Buckbeak’s Flight
Harry in Winter
Return to Hogwarts (HBP video game)
Lily’s Theme (I propose reworking it into a variant of A Window to the Past)

Proposed Themes:
Quirrel’s Theme
Lupin’s Theme
Snape’s Theme
Neville’s Theme
The Order of the Phoenix
Draco’s Theme
Horcrux Theme (we could just use Voldemort’s Theme for this)
The Deathly Hallows

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I’ve actually been doing some preliminary work on color-correcting the films. The massive desaturation drives me nuts. They’re fantasy adventures, not horror films, and thematically not exactly the darkest stuff out there even at their darkest. The first video in that series calls out the color problem too.

I love the idea of drawing the soundtrack together, though I’m quite the baby at rescoring.

The Hobbit: Back Once Again

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I’m glad someone else agrees with me about the color. I much prefer the warm tones of Columbus and Newell to the dark, blue, desaturated look of Cuaron and Yates.

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Yes yes!

Adding saturation is a trickier thing than removing it, but I’m discovering that I can get a lot of results without such a huge change that it looks artificial, at least in HP4 where I was experimenting. Add just a bit more saturation and white adjustment to the Great Hall scene, for example, and suddenly the Beauxbatons students actually wear blue dresses! It’s pretty amazing.

I’m a baby at this, though, so much exploration to be done.

I enjoy the Revisited series of the HP movies, but the goal of those edits is draw the earlier movies closer in line with the darkness of the later films. I’d love to take a stab at a Lighter and Brighter Edition, which tries to draw out the joy of childhood in a magical boarding school. That is what really drew me into the book series to begin with. That would have to involve scene edits, color correction, and a lot of soundtrack work, since often it’s the soundtrack more than anything else that sets the tone. The goal wouldn’t be to make it goofy or anything, just start from a more lighthearted place and slow the descent into darkness as one progresses through the series.

Big project, though. Much learning to be done.

The Hobbit: Back Once Again

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I’d love to take a stab at a Lighter and Brighter Edition, which tries to draw out the joy of childhood in a magical boarding school.

That’s what exactly what I hope to accomplish.

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Anakin Starkiller said:

I’d love to take a stab at a Lighter and Brighter Edition, which tries to draw out the joy of childhood in a magical boarding school.

That’s what exactly what I hope to accomplish.

Oh, hey. Not to steal your thunder then! Maybe I can be helpful.

The Hobbit: Back Once Again

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I hesitate to post to this thread for fear of overshadowing the HP Edit Megathread I just made, but this is music specific, so I’ll post it here. Let me know if you guys think that’s the right choice or not. Anyway, while I don’t intend to use non-HP music for my edits, for those who are willing to, I did notice that this theme might not be too out of place in HP.

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I think Fred and George’s theme could come in handy, and while I like that Slughorn theme, it has a largeness to it that makes it hard for me to think of a place to put it off the top of my head.

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I’ve already added Fred and George’s Theme to the scene in GoF where they try to put their names in the Goblet, but couldn’t find any other scenes in the series to add it to.

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So I’ve been thinking about options for giving Snape a theme, and the only theme I could think of for him was In Noctem. I think it could work, assuming one could make a few variations of it that are less dramatic and non lyrical.

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I would just like to say, this is probably the most ambitous project ragarding Harry Potter. We need more people to bring forth ideas, tracks, and maybe even there own modified pieces. Would like to colaborate.

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Also, one more question, are you getting the music tracks from Youtube. If you are, it might be worth knowing that Youtube compresses sound files and thus there is a lost in quality.

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Yes, I’m taking them from YouTube, but they sound perfectly fine to me, so I’m happy.