Comparing Different Forms of the Same Story

The second session I attended was “Same but Different: How Media Morph Narratives” with Kevin Schut. He went into “The Lord of the Rings” and how forms of media - film, book and video game - portray it in a variety of ways. I find it interesting how the same story can be told in several forms. In a book, the picture you get is all in your imagination, and what you imagine a book character to look like will be different than every other person who reads the book imagined the character as. However, once the movie comes out, Frodo Baggins looks like Elijah Wood, and every person who has seen the movie has the same image of Frodo.

Especially in the film, but also the video game, sound has been inserted to create more emotion in the audience. In the book you don’t hear inspirational music build as King Théoden speaks to his riders just before the battle of Gondor. However, the book says that King Théoden “cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before”, and you may imagine this loud booming voice, but in the film his voice sounds disappointingly normal. The video game “The Battle for Middle Earth”, is different than both the film and the book in that the story line can change. For example, Boromir doesn’t die, and you can lose in the game, which is not how the movie and book portray it.

I find it intriguing how different forms of media portray the story of The Lord of the Rings in such a plethora of ways. However, the movie and the video games take away the mystery and the imaginative aspect that the book gives us. How does the technology used to create the movie and video games influence the imagination and creative abilities of our generation?