The beginning of a Silm Film Wiki of sorts?

K

Kathrin

Well-Known Member
Hey everyone

In my free time I play RPG's and someone from my local RPG group is working on this tool where you can catalogue your whole adventure, its worldbuilding and characters, and the events of game sessions. It's still work in progress, but i'm part of the tester group and it look really neat. Just for fun I've started adding Season 1 of Silm Film in it. In the future the session summaries (that I've used like episode summaries here) will be linkable as well, and a bit more formattable. But the Tome of Lore feature is really great, you can basically create new wiki entries as you type and sort them into categories (for example, in the entry for Estel, you type [[c:Aragorn]], or [[l: Rivendell]] , and then automatically a character entry for Aragorn and a location entry for Rivendell will be created in those categories and linked in Estel's entry. There are categories for locations, people, deities, items, events etc. Maybe with time it'll also be possible to make one's own categories. Also you can add files to the session logs and to the lore entries, so we could add scrips, artwork, maps, etc. to the relevant entries.

If participating in something like this would be of interest to you, I can get everyone who wants to a login. It's still in Beta, and technically made for DM's/GM's to organise their sprawling rpg adventures, but I was already testing it and thought it might fit a SilmFilm-Wiki quite well. What do you guys think?



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I can very much see how an RPG tool like this might fit our needs, and even just gathering the scripts in a place where you can actually extract passages from them to articles or insert links to related items would be a great improvement for the organization of the project! =) I can't promise to contribute a lot over the next busy months, but I'd like to do as much as I'm able to. The only requirement, as I see it, is a certain set of standards and guidelines that we agree to follow - that way we can work together rather than alongside each other, and the product of our work will be organized rather than disconnected and messy :D
 
Totally agree, there should be some common ground. I think the episode timeline is fairly straightforward I think, we can try to keep them in summary length and they can be fairly casually written for my taste. It's only for orientation and the script'll be right at ones fingertips. We can establish a tale of years (or several nested ones, ranging from big picture over the ages to detailed chronology) in the events category, if that would be helpful. The general wiki part is probably the most work; what info needs to be there for random Beorian nr. 4, or on some smaller locations somewhere? But the good thing is that you can be very flexible and create new entries after the fact very easily, so there doesn't need to be a preplanned structure.

We can always put links to relevant forum threads, podcast episodes and stuff into entries, so you can retrace where that stuff came from. And of course all the material (visuals, maps, scripts, cast fotos, maybe even soundtrack pieces...)
 
We're lucky that we have script outlines for Seasons 1-3 and full scripts for Season 4 (and outlines? I'm not sure, actually) that can just be imported - what seems most difficult for me so far is figuring out the complete history of characters, how they were portrayed and what is planned for them in the future.

So connected articles about the characters would be most helpful, I think :) Since SilmFilm is more detailed than Tolkien's writing, based on different versions of his stories and also deviates from the source material from time to time, it's not enough to know what Tolkien wrote about a matter. There's a lot of details, scenes and even plotlines that really require you to know the past Seasons' portrayal of characters to think of them or at least to get them right. And there are a lot of great ideas in past forum discussions and podcast episodes that are in danger of being forgotten over the years because they were made in reference to a Season still far away.
 
I will say that I am sporadically working on a "Show Bible" of sorts which can help with this sort of thing. I did make an attempt to start a wiki some time ago, but sadly abandoned the project shortly after. I do have a concern that much of the project's information is most readily available in the memory of long-time participants. The danger of this is if any of us were to leave the project for any reason, some information could be lost.
 
This is fantastic! It looks like it has the potential to be both a thorough and easy-to-use resource for both new participants of SilmFilm and veterans who need to remember what was decided long ago. I'll do my best to contribute what I can.

My biggest concern is consistency within the SilmFilm canon. There are several small deviations between the podcasts and the script outlines and between the outlines and scripts. Are we able to list all the versions of such things?
 
Nicholas Palazzo said:
I will say that I am sporadically working on a "Show Bible" of sorts which can help with this sort of thing. I did make an attempt to start a wiki some time ago, but sadly abandoned the project shortly after. I do have a concern that much of the project's information is most readily available in the memory of long-time participants. The danger of this is if any of us were to leave the project for any reason, some information could be lost.
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That is definitely a problem. And, while a "Show Bible," a wiki, or a reference site of some kind would be awesome to have, it's going to take a lot of work, and I don't see it as being something that will be finished in the near future.

However, perhaps to start, we could compile a sort of "New to SilmFilm? Start here!" list, where we have links to something like the top 12 podcast episodes and some discussion threads that would give newcomers a sense of what the project is like and bring them along with some of the most important decisions that were made. I'm thinking stuff like the episodes at the beginning of each new season where the hosts recap what happened last season, the ones from earlier seasons where they plotted the episode outline of the whole season at once, the casting and creative contribution sessions from the ends of the seasons, and possibly a few individual episode discussions that were particularly interesting.

This isn't really a solution to sorting out the sheer volume of material associated with SilmFilm, but it may be a solution to preventing all that material from deterring interested newcomers.

As someone who just joined the project in the middle of Season 4, I don't feel comfortable compiling this list alone, but if people are interested in working with me on it, let me know!
 
Nicholas Palazzo said:
I will say that I am sporadically working on a "Show Bible" of sorts which can help with this sort of thing. I did make an attempt to start a wiki some time ago, but sadly abandoned the project shortly after. I do have a concern that much of the project's information is most readily available in the memory of long-time participants. The danger of this is if any of us were to leave the project for any reason, some information could be lost.
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That sounds like a very useful resource - thank you for your effort! =) Will you share it with us? We might be able to help with integrating it into this project.

Rhiannon said:
My biggest concern is consistency within the SilmFilm canon. There are several small deviations between the podcasts and the script outlines and between the outlines and scripts. Are we able to list all the versions of such things?
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Considering the script (outlines) for each Season were approved and improved upon by the script discussion on the podcast, I feel comfortable using the most fleshed out versions we have of each episode as "canon" :D If deviations come up, they can be listed but I don't think we have to worry about them too much. Since SilmFilm isn't actually going into production we can always choose versions in a way that lines up with later decisions.


Rhiannon said:
However, perhaps to start, we could compile a sort of "New to SilmFilm? Start here!" list, where we have links to something like the top 12 podcast episodes and some discussion threads that would give newcomers a sense of what the project is like and bring them along with some of the most important decisions that were made. I'm thinking stuff like the episodes at the beginning of each new season where the hosts recap what happened last season, the ones from earlier seasons where they plotted the episode outline of the whole season at once, the casting and creative contribution sessions from the ends of the seasons, and possibly a few individual episode discussions that were particularly interesting.

This isn't really a solution to sorting out the sheer volume of material associated with SilmFilm, but it may be a solution to preventing all that material from deterring interested newcomers.

As someone who just joined the project in the middle of Season 4, I don't feel comfortable compiling this list alone, but if people are interested in working with me on it, let me know!
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That sounds like a good idea! As someone who got into SilmFilm recently, I found the first episode of SilmFilm where the foundations were laid and the recent script discussion episodes to be most interesting and helpful in terms of catching up with the essential information - I liked listening to almost all the episodes, but considering they're ~2 hours long and often not very dense I can see most people doing better with fewer rather than many episode recommendations. For the forum threads, the most useful would probably be looking through the General and Episode Question sub-forums and reading threads that interest one the most - the specific subforums like costumes or casting are something to visit if one's interested in something like that.

I can only speak for myself on this particular point, but even more than important threads and episodes, reading finished Season 4 scripts did wonders for my interest in this project :D They're definitely what I would recommend to newcomers as well, particularly the first few as an introduction.
 
I think it would be very sad if a lot of it got lost. I don't think it all has to be comprehensively archived in this wiki, we still have the forum threads, but it would help a lot probably if there were some more navigable version of the project, which then would ideally link to longer forum discussions, podcasts etc. At least for me, this would also be helpful to keep up with the project, to remember what exactly happened in SilmFilm Season 3 and not confuse it with the pubSilm canon. Anyway, the tool I mentioned as for now isn't accessable by link openly, but that's coming soon. But for now, if anyone would like access to it to see what it's like and maybe help start build it up a bit, write me a dm with your email adress and I'll set you up :)
 
This tool looks really fantastic! While I am not really available to create entries myself (the number of hours of my life this project takes up is already rather substantial, and I have to set limits for myself), I am certainly willing to help edit and contribute if there are any questions or uncertainties.

For instance, to answer an earlier question, there are script outlines for every episode in Seasons 1-4. :) We only have completed scripts for Season 4, but we do have some work-in-progress scripts from earlier seasons.
 
Oh I think no one would ask *you* to do more work :D I've done short summaries for all episodes of Season 1 now and added the Outlines in there. I think that is very doable for me, at least to draft them up. It's gonna be the wiki part, and maybe timeline stuff of it that's is more work, and having an overview over all the material in order to know what exactly we even need to compile and from where.

Part of that is the question: what do we want from a wiki? I personally don't think we need to basically rewrite the entire wikis of the pubSilm that are out there, entries for characters/objects/locations/events that are more or less unchanged can be very short and straightforward, but might wanna note down the relevant Silmfilm-additions and changes. The problem is i don't have all of those structured well enough in my head to just start typing.
 
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Yeah, my guess is that that type of thing will grow organically as things come up. 'Who is Gil-galad's father in Silm Film?' quickly leads to a discussion of Orodreth's family - how Orodreth is son of Angrod and his wife is Meril (a Sinda woman he met at the Mereth Aderthad) and their first child Finduilas is born sometime between FA 260 and FA 310 (being introduced as a child in the final montage of Season 4 Episode 13), and Gil-galad is her younger brother (introduced ???).

Things to include might be stuff like the 'balrog rule' - when a balrog appears on screen, a named character among the Elves and Men is going to die. There are no battles/fights with balrogs in which only nameless extras die. Because this is definitely Silm Film-specific, and not simply the published Silmarillion.
 
I feel like we can keep the pub-Silm-compatible part quite short. I don't know if we need both versions if it diverges? Might be good if it's a possibly confusing change. For photos of castings, that's no problem, you can upload those to the entry directly
 
Wiki pages often have one or more images associated with them. We obviously wouldn't be able to have images of everything to start, but we can put the fan art that's already been created for SilmFilm on there, and perhaps some other artists will be inspired to create pictures for the pages that don't have images yet.
 
I wouldn't go out of my way to highlight changes we made, at least in the beginning - it could be helpful in some cases, but good wikis like Tolkiengateway and the primary sources can help clear up any possible confusion. In most cases we just added a lot of details, to be honest - and with how different in medium and scope our adaptation is, our emphasis is rightly on our story, not on a HoMe-style comparison between different versions.
 
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