Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

Humans become bewildered when given too much ambiguous information in an illogical order. Unfortunately, this is how the text of The Lord of the Rings operates. Between its myriad of perspectives, thousands of years of in-universe history, multiple languages and cultures, and an entire planet of locations, the material seems muddled even to experienced readers. The overwhelming effect of Tolkien’s Legendarium is part of the experience; the reader does not have to know the entire story to feel immersed in the fantasy world but studying both the constructs of Middle-earth and the real-world history upon which it was based enables the reader to understand the complex motivations of the characters. While I am all for embarking on in-depth research, most readers do not have the time or energy for such study. Additionally, trying to remember all this material takes up a lot of headspace. In user experience research, the amount of stress while using available headspace is known as “cognitive load”, and people do not like heavy cognitive loads. What would be most useful for them is receiving information conveyed in the original text through extensive timelines, maps, and essays only at the time it was relevant. This eliminates the need for extensive preparation and heavy cognitive loads while viewing.

The concept of delivering relevant information in a simple, readable format has been mastered by different industries and media, including aviation, video games, and television. From the earliest head-up displays aiding fighter pilots of World War II to the digital onscreen graphics providing statistics during sports games, designers have used visuals to better convey what is happening during moments of high activity. In this week’s essay, I review the history of these designs and reveal how I would use these methodologies for the hypothetical animated musical.

Cruise the Skies or Shoot ’em Down: Head-Up Displays in Vehicles

Also known as head-up guidance systems, HUDs were invented as an aid for Allied pilots during World War II as they gunned down enemy aircraft. Some of the technology behind the displays had appeared during World War I. Pilots used reflector sights or reflex sights with a reticle image, a fancy way of saying that when they looked through a piece of glass at a certain angle, a mirror would cause an image like a bullseye to appear, helping the pilots to focus on their target. While this information was useful, more details were desired. By the time the de Havilland Mosquito of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) came into production in 1941, a larger piece of glass allowed pilots to see radar and a horizon line.

At the same time, a HUD was fitted to another RAF plane, the Supermarine Spitfire, whose first flight came in 1935. Aircraft designer R.J. Mitchell had developed the plane, which was among the most valuable weapons during the war, but he died of cancer in 1937, a mere two years after the first flight. The modern Spitfire Society honors his work by constructing replicas of his planes. As for the HUD, some spitfires had reflector sights like WWI era planes, while others had gyroscopic systems, also known as a gyro gunsight or GGS. As expertly explained by U.S. Air Force history expert and YouTuber Wistarmo Moore, a fighter pilot “must determine how far out in front of the enemy aircraft [to] aim”, since the bullet takes time to travel the distance between the shooting aircraft and the target aircraft.

Scottish mathematician and RAF officer Dr. Leslie Bennett Craigie Cunningham invented and patented this tool in 1936. He used surprisingly basic math to determine when a pilot would have to fire to hit an enemy plane. Then, he created a tool to do the math for the pilot. The tool used two reflector sights with a reticle image: one sight stayed in place, while the other moved on a gyroscope. The tool also included magnets to prevent the gyroscope from moving too wildly if the pilot had to quickly turn. Upon spotting an enemy plane, the pilot maneuvered the plane so that the gyroscope sight stayed on the enemy aircraft while he shot the gun using the in-place sight. This allowed for a high percentage of direct hits, and caused the United States to appropriate and improve upon this technology to develop sights for aircraft and navy vessels.

The companies Elliot Flight Automation Research Laboratory, which was subsequently bought and dissolved by BAE Systems, and Cintel claim the invention of the first modern HUD, which debuted in the British fighter plane Blackburn Buccaneer in 1961. A leader in this field was Stafford “Staff” Malcolm Ellis, who managed a team developing the HUD used on the A-7 Corsair, an American attack plane. Around the same time in 1965, General Motors considered putting a HUD in the Mako Shark II concept car but did not end up going forward with this idea.

A big shift to HUDs came in 1985. That year, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved a HUD for the Boeing 727 built by Flight Dynamics Incorporated, a company acquired by Rockwell International in 1999 before that company splintered in 2001. Meanwhile, General Motors bought Hughes Aircraft Company, which had been founded by film producer and plane enthusiast Howard Hughes in 1932. This new tech allowed GM to add a HUD to a special edition 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Convertible and hire test pilot Chuck Yeager to drive the thing around a test track as a marketing ploy.

Almost forty years later, the HUD has not widely expanded into the commercial vehicle market. While a few venture start-ups have attempted HUDs, holographic augmented reality graphics tend to be more distracting than helpful. A study from 2023 showed that HUDs may train commercial pilots to rely heavily on technology, lose their ability to analyze and combine information from multiple sources, and hurt their decision-making skills, leading to a higher number of preventable accidents. As fun and futuristic as a HUD might seem while driving, we are likely safer without them.

Problem Solve or Shoot ’em Up: HUDs in Video Games

In contrast, a video game played in the comfort of one’s own home is the ideal setting for a HUD. Sometimes known as a status bar, this visual interface provides context for what is happening in the virtual environment. HUDs have existed for as long as the popular videogame. Created by twenty-four-year-old American Allan Alcorn of Atari Corporations in 1972, the arcade version of Pong was a simple, digital ping pong game that kept score at the top of the screen. Similarly, when thirty-four-year-old Japanese Tomohiro Nishikado of Taito released Space Invaders in 1978, it included information on current score and “hi-score” at the top of the screen. In contrast, the original version of Tetris, created by twenty-nine-year-old Russian Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, had no scoring or levels and therefore no HUD.

As video games have become more complex, so have their HUDs. An article in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies from 2016 detailed how users interact with modern HUDs during gameplay. Since I am not an avid gamer, but I do know quite a bit about user research and eye-tracking studies, I found this paper useful in determining how to design the HUD for the musical. The results of the study showed that a HUD likely helped players understand what was happening during the game, especially when “composition and spatial organization” were designed properly. Elements of the display must be designed in an aesthetically pleasing way and appear in the same location each time. Additionally, expert players used HUDs frequently and found them useful, while novice players might hardly have glanced at these stats. The same would likely be the case for the musical; someone well-versed in the Legendarium might be fascinated by the references, while a viewer approaching the story for the first time might not realize their importance but have a perfectly delightful experience even when ignoring them.

Animated Logos and Score Bugs: HUDs on Television

The design of HUDs on television work much the same as those in video games. However, they often receive a different name, such as digital on-screen graphic or screen bug. These images serve a range of purposes, although the most common are a logo for the tv station or statistical information during a sports game or news. Ever since the tv was invented, people have tried to make their programs clearer with whatever technology they had available.

In the earliest days of television, physical slides were held up in front of a camera lens and filmed, requiring one person behind the camera and one person holding up a slide. This was inefficient and time consuming, not to mention requiring significant planning ahead of time. An electronic character generation system or ECG would allow previously typed text to be displayed on the screen, a major improvement over handheld cards. CBS Laboratories had been established for such technological problems by CBS (formerly Columbia Broadcasting System) back in 1936 with the hiring of television engineer Peter Carl Goldmark. Over thirty years later in 1967, CBS Labs partnered with Visual Electronics to create the first ECG worthy of broadcasts, which they called “Vidifont” or “Vidiloop”. Leading this project was Stanley Baron, who published “A Television Compatible Character Generator” detailing how the system worked in 1972.

That same year, Chyron created a “real-time character generator system”, allowing designers to type out whatever needed to be said and display the information at the bottom of the screen. The company had begun just six years earlier in 1966 under the name Chiron Telesystems, paying homage to the smart and friendly centaur of Greco-Roman mythology who acted like a teacher, in contrast to the other centaurs who were rude and violent. The clever folk at CBS Labs figured out how to pair the Chiron system with their own Vidiloop system to add special effects like color and tilting to their letters. Around 1975, Chiron Telesystems took its new name Chyron Corp., and the brand name “Chyron” has become synonymous with the lower third.

While words are all good, a picture is worth a thousand of them, and tiny logos began appearing onscreen around the same time. Among the earliest of these graphics appeared in the United States in 1973 on the Boston-based public broadcasting station (PBS) WGBH, also known as channel 2. Design work was done by the New York-based firm Chermayeff & Geismar, now called Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, and the firm has since expanded to collaborating with other television networks and related assets, including NBC, Warner Bros., and National Geographic. These little graphics or “bugs” were supposed to appear briefly as a gentle reminder to the viewer of what channel they were watching or what show was up next, but they have become increasingly animated and obnoxious over time.

The potentially most helpful or most distracting of these might be score bugs, boxes that appear around the screen during a sports game. These may show time left in the game, score, names of teams, names of players, penalties, or other essential information. Sports bugs first appeared in the early to mid-1990s thanks to the innovations of angry men, according to a New York Times article from 2014. David Hill of British television channel Sky Sports became angry when he never learned the score of a soccer game while watching the BBC, and he added the feature to his station. He then added the feature to NFL on Fox in 1994 after changing jobs and initially received death threats about his innovation. Meanwhile, Jed Drake of ESPN and ABC added a similar feature with commercial sponsorship to MLB games the same year, but he apparently broke his hand by punching a truck in anger when the system did not work right away. The creation of HUDs for my hypothetical musical will be a much calmer affair.

A HUD for the Musical

When created in a way that honors the original text, adaptions of Tolkien’s work are apt to be a complex affair. Between thousands of years of fantasy history based on real-world history, conflicting accounts of these events, multiple character perspectives, and characters with half a dozen names, the whole business is both rich in worldbuilding and in confusion. While bewilderment and ambiguity are instrumental to the tone of the work, some uncertainties were intended to be clear but require a higher-level degree in a technical field to sort out. Fortunately, I have such education and am willing to put in the work to ease the mind of the more casual viewer.

Confusion is reduced when the reader is able to answer a few simple questions such as:

Did this happen in the book?
Where in Middle-earth are we?
What time is this event taking place?
Who do I see or who is talking?

By answering these questions in a clear and consistent format, the viewer can then free up their headspace to think about more complex questions, such as how might the understanding of these factors differ between the understanding of the viewers, the character currently driving perspective, and other characters in the scene. If viewers are not inclined to analyze media beyond its surface level, they do not have to consider the more complex questions at all and may be all the happier for it.

Since an early in-universe manuscript of The Lord of the Rings will be featured widely throughout the framing device, and most of the scenes in the hypothetical musical would be taken directly from the book, I wanted the names of each section to be obvious and correlate to chapters in the book. The text would appear at the center of the screen with the Roman numeral of the book, then the Arabic numeral of the chapter, and then the name of the chapter. For example, the first dialogue portion of the original text would be stylized “Book I / Chapter 1 / “A Long-Expected Party”. Elanor would act as a narrator, simultaneously reading the text as it appeared. In the few instances when material original from the appendixes or earlier drafts of Tolkien’s text was introduced, the section instead would indicate that this was supplemental material, such as “Book II / Supplement 1 / “An Extended Stay in Rivendell”. At the end of such a section, Elanor would be seen removing the material from the manuscript and make a verbal note of what she might do with it.

Tolkien and subsequent cartographers have provided maps for locating nearly any place mentioned in the original text, as previously discussed in “Introduction to Maps”. The appearance of maps in television and film is fairly common, whether these appear on the weather channel, in documentaries such as those demonstrating troop movements in Ken Burns’ The Civil War, or in comedies like the Muppets traveling by map in The Muppets (2011). For places of high importance, the map would originally appear zoomed into the place of interest, then zoom out to reveal the whole of Middle-earth. Additionally, the name of each region would appear as the map zoomed out. If Bag End was the place in question, the full list would be “Bag End, Underhill, Hobbiton, West Farthing, The Shire, Eriador, Middle-earth”. Once the area has received its zoom out, it will not receive the same effect again; however, the name will continue to appear on the map. If a place is not of such a high level of importance to the rest of the story, such as 3 Bag Shot Lane, Brandy Hall, or Tuckborough, then it would be displayed on a local map but not the continental map.

Next comes the question of time. As last mentioned in “Appendix D: Shire Calendar”, every race of Middle-earth seems to have its own calendar system, and some have multiple systems, all of which differ from the Gregorian calendar used in the Real World. I have decided that the calendar used by Hobbits of the Shire will be the base for my date system. The first item to appear in the HUD would be the calendar as it originally appeared for Hobbits: the month would be written in Cirth at the top of the calendar, as last discussed in “An Unofficial Logo”. The numbers on the calendar would be written in Tengwar, since information on Cirth numerals is incomplete. Plus, it’s common for numerals to come from a different writing system than letters; modern English uses the Latin alphabet with Arabic numerals. The original calendar would then fade into a translated calendar, and a red circle would be drawn around the date.

At the same time, the name of the date would fade in below the calendar. Next, a note on the modern name for the month would fade in below. Then two years would be given based on two different calendars: that used in Rivendell with a similar calendar in Gondor, and that used in the Shire. Below this may appear a countdown to important events within the text. For example, on the day that Frodo, Sam, and Pippin leave Bag End to begin the quest that ends in the destruction of the Ring, the countdown would read “32 Days / Until the Many Meetings / 186 Days / Until the End of All Things”. I have done my best with calculating countdown days using the Shire Reckoning calendar coded by Psarando. Between emphasizing the names of chapter titles and featuring a countdown, the viewer would be firmly situated in the timeline of the story that Tolkien so carefully constructed.

The final HUD feature would be occasional labels featuring names and occupations of characters appearing on screen. Because many scenes include people of the same race and nationality who appear in uniform, The Lord of the Rings could potentially suffer from the Chariots of Fire effect where everybody looks the same. These labels are common features of documentaries, a genre thoroughly discussed in “Introduction to the History of Documentaries”, and when implemented correctly remind the viewers who is speaking without becoming a distraction. These labels might coincide with verbal dialogue or internal dialogue that was originally descriptive text in the book, such as Bilbo thinking about relatives present at his 111^st birthday party or Elrond introducing delegates at his council.

By borrowing familiar heads-up display elements from other media, the complexity of the original text can be honored by providing layers of information to viewers in a digestible format. Just like airplanes, video games, and tv shows, the HUD will require user experience testing and multiple design drafts to arrive at its most legible form. This carefully constructed interface will make the experience enjoyable for viewers of all levels and encourage them to read the original text for themselves.

Watch a demo reel of the head-up display: