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It might be clearer if I described it as an historical film. Something very different to Dark Crystal or Labyrinth . Imagine something like Braveheart, but with a little of the visual magic of Legend. ... It should have the historical authority of Braveheart, rather than the meaningless fantasy mumbo-jumbo of Willow. [14]
In November 1997, the Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe joined the project. [27] Up until then, concept artists had primarily been influenced by Dungeons & Dragons in their designs. Some of their famous images of Bag End, Orthanc, Helm's Deep, the Black Gate, and Howe's Gandalf and the Balrog made it into the film. The last one inspired the opening sequence of The Two Towers. Jackson sometimes replicated shots from famous Tolkien illustrations as a nod to fans. [38]
Lee worked on designs for architecture, the first being Helm's Deep, [34] as well as the Elven realms, Moria, Edoras, and Minas Tirith, and although Howe primarily designed armour and the forces of evil, he contributed to the design of Bag End, Minas Morgul, Cirith Ungol and Barad-dûr. Lee applied a personal touch by painted imagery in Rivendell, such as of Isildur removing the One Ring from Sauron, as well as tapestries in Edoras. There are many real-life influences on the Middle-earth of the films: Rivendell is "a cross between a Japanese Temple and Frank Lloyd Wright", [39] and Minas Tirith takes influence from Mont Saint-Michel and the Palatine Chapel in Aachen. The City of the Dead takes stylistic inspiration from Petra, Jordan, and the Grey Havens were inspired by the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. [37]
Grant Major was charged with the task of converting Lee and Howe's designs into architecture, creating models of the sets, whilst Dan Hennah worked as art director, scouting locations and organizing the building of sets. The army often helped out, too, building Hobbiton almost a year before filming [40] to give the impression of real growth and age, moving 5,000 cubic metres (180,000 cu ft) of earth, and creating roads to the Edoras location during six months of building. [41] Some sets were reshaped: the caverns of Isengard became Shelob's Lair, and Helm's Deep became a Minas Tirith backlot. [37]
The Art Department was careful to respect nature, considering its importance to Tolkien, such as taking plants from the Edoras location into a nursery. They sometimes moulded shapes from real rocks and bark, and fixed branches into a steel structure with polystyrene for more convincing prop trees. Brian Massey led the Greens Department, and even wrote a booklet on tree growth when he complained of the props "being too coney" for Lothlórien when the time came to film Fangorn Forest. [34] The numerous props within the trilogy were all originally designed at different scales, and many craftsmen were hired, including Jens Hansen Gold & Silversmith to create 15 replicas of The One Ring. [42] [43]
The contemporary jeweller Jasmine Watson created pieces including the Evenstar jewel worn by Arwen, and Nenya, the ring worn by Galadriel. Statues were sculpted out of polystyrene, although some thrones seen in the trilogy were crafted from marble, stone and wood. A former bank worker, Daniel Reeve, was hired to write the numerous books, spines, documents, maps, diagrams and even Orc graffiti that appear in the trilogy. [44]
Jackson hired longtime collaborator Richard Taylor to lead Wētā Workshop on five major design elements: armour, weapons, prosthetics/make-up, creatures and miniatures. [45] John Howe was the supervisor on armour, having studied and worn it. Stu Johnson and Warren Green made 48,000 pieces of armour from the numerous moulds of plate steel. A small group of crew members spent three years linking plastic chain mail, eventually wearing their thumbprints away. Peter Lyon forged swords, each taking from three to six days, with spring steel "hero" swords for close-ups, aluminum fight swords and rubber versions. Wētā created 10,000 real arrows and 500 bows. [46]
Wētā created numerous prosthetics and continually monitored them on set. They created 1,800 Orc body suits to go with 10,000 Orc heads, taking six days and one day respectively. Wētā spent a year creating hobbit feet to look like large, furry feet, yet act as shoes for the actors. In total, 1,800 pairs were worn by the four lead hobbit actors during production. Actors went in for face casts to create pointed ears and false noses. Most extensive was John Rhys-Davies as Gimli, whose Dwarven prosthetics required four-and-a-half hours to apply each morning. [27]
Wētā's first completed creature was the cave troll. Production designers wanted to make the Orcs totally animalistic before the switch to prosthetics. They gave specific designs to the Moria Orcs, Uruk-hai, and Mordor Orcs, so as to make these characters visually distinct. [39] They sought to make their creatures biologically believable: Shelob's body is based on an Australasian funnel-web spider, while the Wargs are a bear/hyena/wolf hybrid. Howe lent himself for Beswarick to study when shaping Gollum; Beswarick took inspiration from Iggy Pop due to his skin-muscle ratio. [34]
The backstories of the cultures depicted in the films had to be shown through subliminal glimpses on screen, while for the Elves and Gondorians, fictional histories were presented by changing styles of armour. The Elves have an Art Nouveau influence that involves leaves and flowers, while the Dwarves have a preoccupation with geometry intended to remind the audience of their digging nature. [27] The Hobbits hark back to 18th-century England, the Rohirrim feature horse and sun motifs with visual inspiration from Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon artifacts found in the Sutton Hoo burial ship, and the Gondorians reflect 16th-century German and Italian armour and the motif of the White Tree. The evil Haradrim Men take influence from Aztecs and Kiribati after bad feedback from Phillipa Boyens over looking African. Most of the Orc armour is sharp, reflecting secateurs, and is written with runes to reflect worship of Sauron. [37]
Several liberties were taken in adapting Tolkien's weaponry and armour to the screen. While plate armour is used in the films, it is unmentioned in the author's writings (except for vambraces), where scale and especially mail predominate. Some swords, like the broken royal sword Narsil, are interpreted as two-handed longswords. These design choices help evoke the Late Medieval and Renaissance periods, whereas Tolkien's original atmosphere is generally more akin to the Early Medieval period. In a private letter, Tolkien compared Middle-earth clothing and war gear to that of early medieval Europe and the Bayeux Tapestry. [47] [48] Weta invented Elvish inscriptions for weapons like the spear Aeglos and the swords Sting and Narsil. In some cases, Tolkien writes about runes on sword blades but does not give them in detail. The Elves in the film series use curved swords, whereas the author mostly assigns such swords to Orcs and enemy Men (he mentions one Elf with a curved sword in very early writings). [49] The designers went so far as to invent new weapons, such as Arwen's Elvish sword Hadhafang; while the design is original, the name is derived from Tolkien's "Etymologies" in The Lost Road . [50] [51]
To develop fight and sword choreography for the series, the filmmakers employed the Hollywood sword-master Bob Anderson. [52]
Ngila Dickson was hired to handle the numerous costumes. She and 40 seamstresses worked on over 19,000 costumes for the film series. Due to the large shooting schedule, 10 versions of each costume were made, with 30 more for stunt, scale and other doubles, all in all meaning each design had 40 versions. Due to Jackson's requirement of realism, the costumers took great pains to make costumes look "lived in", wearing away colour, stuffing pockets and dirtying costumes for the likes of Gandalf and Aragorn due to their terrain-crossing nature. As with armour, acid etching and overdyeing of colours were applied. Dickson decided to give the Hobbits shorts because of their bare feet, and worked on long sleeves for the Elves for a gliding impression. [53] [27] Dickson took great pains to distinguish the colours worn by the Gondorians (silver and black) and the Rohirrim (brown and green). [37] Elijah Wood, who portrayed Frodo, revealed in 2021 that one of the Orcs was designed to resemble Harvey Weinstein. [54]
Principal photography for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was conducted concurrently in New Zealand for 438 days from 11 October 1999 through 22 December 2000. [55] Pick-up shoots were conducted annually from 2001 to 2003. The trilogy was shot at many different locations, with seven different units shooting, as well as at soundstages around Wellington and Queenstown. Jackson directed the whole production, while unit directors included Alun Bollinger, John Mahaffie, Geoff Murphy, Fran Walsh, Barrie Osborne and Rick Porras. Jackson monitored these units with live satellite feeds, and with the added pressure of constant script re-writes and the multiple units handling his vision, he only got around four hours of sleep a night. [34]
Jackson described the production as the world's largest home movie, due to the independence and sense of family. [37] Producer Barrie Osborne saw it as a travelling circus. [34] Fran Walsh described writing the script for the production as laying the track down in front of a moving train. Jackson described shooting as like organizing an army, with 2,400 people involved at the height of production. Due to the remoteness of some of New Zealand's untamed landscapes, the crew carried survival kits in case helicopters could not reach the locations to bring them home in time. [27]
The first scene filmed was the "Wooded Road" sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring, where the Hobbits hide beneath a tree from a mounted Ringwraith. The focus was generally on The Fellowship of the Ring when the Hobbits try to reach Rivendell, such as a single night in Bree exteriors, to encourage the four actors playing the hobbits to bond. Second units shot the Ford of Bruinen chase and the deforestation of Isengard. Liv Tyler generally came to New Zealand for stunts, and spent five days on a barrel for Bruinen while her riding double Jane Abbott did the horseback scenes. [27]
During the first month of filming, Stuart Townsend was deemed too young to play Aragorn; he was replaced within three days by Viggo Mortensen, just in time to film the Weathertop sequence. Mortensen, who took the role in part because his own son was a fan of the series, became a hit on set, going fishing, always taking his "hero" sword around and applying dirt to his costume to improve costume designer Ngila Dickson's makeshift look. [27] He headbutted the stunt team as a sign of friendship, [34] and bought himself his horse, Uraeus, as well as another horse for Abbott. [37]
The Cirith Ungol stair ledge was built as a wet weather set on a squash court in a hotel in Queenstown. On 24 November 1999, Sean Astin's close-ups on the Cirith Ungol set were shot in what became the first shots to be filmed for The Return of the King. Andy Serkis (Gollum) had not yet been cast. [37] The set remained standing on the squash court and it was not until a year later, on 30 November 2000, that Elijah Wood's first close-ups were shot on the same ledge. This became a general failsafe measure when the weather disrupted the shooting schedule. [34] Shooting then focused on the battle of Amon Hen. Sean Bean began filming in November. [27]
A Christmas break and Millennium celebrations followed; filming resumed on 17 January. Ian McKellen, fresh from filming X-Men , arrived to film scenes in Hobbiton and the Grey Havens. McKellen worked mainly with the hobbits' scale doubles rather than the actual hobbit actors, but when Christopher Lee arrived in February, they became very friendly. [27] The Grey Havens sequence at the end of The Return of the King was shot three times. [37]
While the Hobbit leads had scenes in Hobbiton interiors and Rivendell exteriors in Kaitoke Park with new arrival Ian Holm, Mortensen, Orlando Bloom and John Rhys-Davies filmed scenes involving the Rohirrim countryside. Mortensen broke his toe kicking an Orc helmet on camera, Bloom fell off his horse and broke a rib, and Rhys-Davies' scale and stunt double Brett Beattie dislocated his knee. They spent two days injured during the "orc hunting" sequence seen in the second film. Soon after, they spent a month of day shoots at Helm's Deep and another three months of night shoots handled by Mahaffie, in Dry Creek Quarry outside Wellington, during which one of Mortensen's teeth was knocked out and Bernard Hill was hit on the ear with the flat of a sword. The extras insulted each other in Māori and improvised stunts, partially because those dressed in Uruk-hai prosthetics got extremely cold. [34]
The production then got larger, with Wood and Astin shooting scenes in Mount Ruapehu for Emyn Muil and Mount Doom. On 13 April 2000, Andy Serkis joined the cast. In the meantime, the Battle of the Black Gate was shot, during which Sala Baker wore the Sauron armour. The Black Gate scene was filmed at a former minefield in the Rangipo Desert, and soldiers served as extras. [37] With the return of Sean Bean, the Fellowship reunited and proceeded to shoot the Moria sequence. [57]
In June they began shooting scenes on soundstages with Cate Blanchett for Lothlórien, [58] as well as a week of exterior shooting for the Lothlórien farewell sequence. [27] Other scenes shot in June were the Paths of the Dead across various locations, including Pinnacles. In July the crew shot some Shelob scenes, while another unit shot in July to August, and during September the scenes in Fangorn Forest and Isengard were developed. Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd tried numerous takes of their entrance, stressing the word "weed" as they smoked pipe-weed. Christopher Lee spent his part of his scene mostly alone, though McKellen and Hill arrived on the first day for a few lines to help. [57]
Detailed online diaries kept by McKellen during the filming of the series beginning in January 2000 titled the Gray Book and the White Book, mirroring his character's transformation, became known as an early source of information of how the concept of the prologue, the opening and the shape of the movie were in flux during production, and have been described as an early embrace of the online blogging concept. [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65]
Pick-up shoots were conducted from 2001 to 2003 for six weeks every year, with a Paths of the Dead scene in 2004. [37]
The filming aroused concern over the environmental impact on the many film locations within New Zealand's national parks and conservation areas. Wingnut Films were granted a concession from the to film within these areas. The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand and the Tongariro/Taupo Conservation Board questioned the concession, as it incorrectly allowed activities, such as fantasy filming and vehicles off-roads at Tongariro National Park, inconsistent with park management plans. The ecological significance of an internationally important wetland was missed. The process was rushed through without public involvement. Considerations of effects and their mitigation were not rigorous. Access was granted for a large-scale operation that had nothing to do with the parks' conservation purposes. [66] The filming in Tongariro National Park caused enough disturbance to areas including "Orc Road", that contractors had to be hired to restore the areas later. [67]
Each film had the benefit of a full year of post-production time before its respective December release, often finishing in October or November, with the crew immediately going to work on the next film. In this period's later part, Jackson moved to London to supervise the scoring and to continue editing, while having a computer feed for discussions to The Dorchester Hotel, and a "fat pipe" of Internet connections from Pinewood Studios to look at the special effects. He had a video link and 5.1 surround sound to organize meetings and listen to new music and sound effects generally wherever he was. The extended editions had a tight schedule at the start of each year to complete special effects and music. [68]
Jackson initially intended to edit all three films himself at once, assisted by Jamie Selkirk. This soon proved too ambitious, and Selkirk (who continued to act as the supervising editor) hired a different editor for the first two films: John Gilbert, who worked some reels to be shown to distributors during the shoot and edited the first film, while Michael J. Horton and Jabez Olssen worked on the second. Selkirk and Annie Collins edited the third. Initially, they were all intended to cut them simultaneously, but after a month, overseeing three edits became too much for Jackson, and he focused on editing the first film, [69] while the other editors created assemblies of the other films. [16] Daily rushes often lasted for as much as four hours, with scenes created throughout 1999 to 2002 for the rough (4½-hour) assemblies of the films. [27] In total, 1,828 kilometres (5,997,000 ft) of film, representing 1110 hours, was edited down to the 11 hours and 26 minutes of the extended edition's running time. [70]
The first film's editing was relatively easygoing, although after a screening to New Line they had to re-edit the beginning for a prologue. The Two Towers was always acknowledged by the crew as the most difficult film to make, as "it had no beginning or end", with the additional problem of inter-cutting storylines appropriately. Jackson continued editing when that part of the schedule officially ended, resulting in some scenes, including the reforging of Andúril, Gollum's backstory, and Saruman's demise, being moved to The Return of the King. Later, Saruman's demise was cut from the theatrical edition (but included in the extended edition) when Jackson felt it was not starting the third film effectively enough. [71] As with all parts of the third film's post-production, editing was chaotic. The first time Jackson actually saw the completed film was the day before the Wellington premiere. [72]
Many filmed scenes remained unused, even in the extended editions. Promotional material for The Fellowship of the Ring contained an attack by Orcs from Moria on Lothlórien after the Fellowship leaves Moria, replaced with a more suspenseful entrance for the Fellowship. Also cut were scenes from the book, including Frodo seeing more of Middle-earth at Parth Galen, an extended Council of Elrond [27] and new scenes with an attack upon Frodo and Sam at the river Anduin by an Uruk-hai. [27]
A major cut from The Two Towers featured Arwen and Elrond visiting Galadriel at Lothlórien, with Arwen then leading the Elven reinforcements to Helm's Deep. [34] This scene, and a flashback to Arwen and Aragorn's first meeting, was cut during a revision of the film's plot; the Elves' appearance was explained with a telepathic communication between Elrond and Galadriel. [34] Éowyn was to have a greater role in defending the refugees in the Glittering Caves from Uruk-hai intruders, [73] while in Osgiliath, Faramir was to have a vision of Frodo becoming like Gollum, [34] with Frodo and Sam having an extended fight sequence. [74]
Filmed for The Return of the King were two scenes present in the book: Sam using the Phial of Galadriel to pass the Watchers at Cirith Ungol, and further epilogue footage, with endings for Legolas and Gimli, Éowyn and Faramir's wedding and Aragorn's death and funeral. [75] Sauron was to fight Aragorn at the Black Gate, but with Jackson deciding the scene was inappropriate, a computer-generated troll was used instead. [37] To give context for Wormtongue killing Saruman, and Legolas in turn killing Wormtongue, it was to be revealed that Wormtongue poisoned Théodred. [76] The final scene cut was Aragorn having his armour fitted for the Battle of the Black Gate by the trilogy's armourers, which was the final scene filmed during principal photography. [37]
Canadian composer Howard Shore composed, orchestrated, conducted and produced the trilogy's music. He was hired in August 2000 [77] and visited the set, and then watched the assembly cuts of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King. In the music, Shore included many (85 to 110) leitmotifs to represent various characters, cultures, and places – the largest catalogue of leitmotifs in the history of cinema, surpassing that of the entire Star Wars film series. For example, there are multiple leitmotifs just for the hobbits and the Shire. Although the first film had some of its score recorded in Wellington, [27] virtually all of the trilogy's score was recorded in Watford Town Hall and mixed at Abbey Road Studios. Jackson planned to advise the score for six weeks each year in London, though for The Two Towers he stayed for twelve. [34]
The three scores were primarily played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (ranging from 93 to 120 players throughout the recording), London Voices, and London Oratory School Schola boy choir; many other artists, such as Ben Del Maestro, Enya, Renée Fleming, James Galway, Annie Lennox and Emilíana Torrini, contributed. Even the actors Billy Boyd, Viggo Mortensen, Liv Tyler, Miranda Otto (extended cuts only for the latter two) and Peter Jackson (for a single gong sound in the second film) contributed to the score. Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens served as librettists, writing lyrics to various music and songs, which David Salo translated into Tolkien's languages. The third film's end song, "Into the West", was a tribute to a young filmmaker Jackson and Walsh befriended named Cameron Duncan, who died of cancer in 2003. [37]
Shore composed a main theme for The Fellowship of the Ring rather than many different character themes, and its strengths and weaknesses in volume are depicted at different points in the series. On top of that, individual themes were composed to represent different cultures. Infamously, the amount of music Shore had to write every day for the third film increased dramatically to around seven minutes. [37] The music for the series turned out to be a success and has been voted best movie soundtrack of all time for the six years running, passing Schindler's List (1993), Gladiator (2000), Star Wars (1977), and Out of Africa (1985) respectively. [78]
Sound technicians spent the early part of each year trying to find the right sounds. Fran Walsh contributed to the Nazgûl scream [79] and David Farmer the Warg howls. Other sounds were unexpected: the fell beast's screech is taken from that of a donkey, and the mûmakil's bellow comes from the beginning and end of a lion's roar. In addition, automated dialogue replacement was used for most of the dialogue. The technicians worked with New Zealand locals to get many of the sounds. They re-recorded sounds in abandoned tunnels for an echo-like effect in the Moria sequence. 20,000 New Zealand cricket fans provided the sound of the Uruk-hai army in The Two Towers, with Jackson acting as conductor during the innings break of a one-day international cricket match between England and New Zealand at Westpac Stadium. [34] They spent time recording sounds in a graveyard at night, and also had construction workers drop stone blocks for the sounds of boulders firing and landing in The Return of the King. Mixing took place between August and November at "The Film Mix", before Jackson commissioned the building of a new studio in 2003. The building, however, had not yet been fully completed when they started mixing for The Return of the King. [37]
The film series used many practical and digital visual effects that were unheard of in the film industry. Ranging from prosthetics and props to creatures almost entirely made through computer graphics, the process of making the film series has been praised as having advanced the field of cinematic visual effects. Wētā Workshop was the major stylistic force behind the films, working on concepts, sets and digital effects years before the first scenes were even shot. The series was also briefly aided by Digital Domain in the first movie. Props, sets, prosthetics and locations were given the utmost concentration and detail to achieve a look that was as realistic as possible. [80]
Production was complicated by the use of scale doubles (of sets) and forced perspective on a level never seen before in the film industry. In the Middle-earth storyverse, Hobbits are 3 ft 6 in (107 cm) tall, Dwarves are slightly taller at about 4 ft 6 in (137 cm), and Men and Elves are average human height, about 5 ft (150 cm) to 6 ft (180 cm). However, the films used two scale sets instead of three by casting taller than average actors to play Dwarves, then combining Dwarves and Hobbits into one size scale. Elijah Wood is 5 ft 6 in (168 cm) tall in real life, but his character, Frodo Baggins, is Hobbit-sized. John Rhys-Davies, who played the Dwarf Gimli, is taller than Wood. Thus in the ending shot of the Council of Elrond scene, when all nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring are standing together, Rhys-Davies and the four Hobbit actors were filmed first. The human-sized characters (Gandalf, Aragorn, Boromir and Legolas) were filmed in a second take, and the two shots were composited at different scales to make one image, making the initial Dwarf/Hobbit character shot seem smaller. An unintended advantage of not creating a third scale for Dwarves is that in a scene in which only Dwarves and Hobbits interact, no scale doubles are needed. [81]
Weta coined the term "bigature" for the 72 large miniatures produced for the film, in reference to their extreme size. [82] Out of around six of the shooting crews, there was one specifically devoted to filming on the miniatures, working continuously for years until the end of The Return of the King. [80] Such miniatures include the 1:4 scale for Helm's Deep, which alongside Khazad-dûm and Osgiliath, was one of the first built. [83] Most sets were constructed to allow compositing with the models and matte paintings, and were built in sections to make them easier to travel with. Each of these "bigatures" were required to have an extreme amount of detail, as the cameras were filming within inches of the masterpieces to make the sets look as realistic as possible. [80] Notable examples include the Argonath, Minas Tirith, the tower and caverns of Isengard, Barad-dûr, the trees of Lothlórien and Fangorn Forest and the Black Gate. Alex Funke led the motion control camera rigs, [84] and John Baster and Mary Maclahlan led the building of the miniatures. The miniatures unit worked more than any other special effects crew, labouring for over 900 days. [84]
Creatures such as trolls, the Watcher in the Water, the Balrog, the Ents, the fell beasts, the Wargs, the mûmakil and Shelob were created entirely with computer-generated imagery. Each one went through months of creation and variation as sketches before approved designs were sculpted into five-foot maquettes and scanned into a computer. Animators then rigged skeletons and muscles before animation and final detailed colouring scanned from painted maquettes. Treebeard had a digital face composited upon the original animatronic, which was scanned for the digital model of his longshots. [85]
Along with the creatures, Weta created realistic digital doubles for many miniature longshots, as well as numerous stunts, most notably for the acrobatic Elf Legolas. These doubles were scanned from having actors perform movements in a motion-capture suit, with additional details created using ZBrush. There are even morphs between the doubles and actors at times. [86] Horses performed with motion capture points, though horse deaths were represented using keyframe animation. [85]
Weta began animating Gollum (also called Sméagol) in late 1998, using a generic human muscle system, to convince New Line Cinema they could achieve it. [81] Andy Serkis played Gollum by providing his voice and movements on set, as well as performing within the motion capture suit. His scenes were filmed twice, with and without him. Originally Gollum was set to solely be a CG character, but Jackson was so impressed by Serkis's audition tape that they used him on set as well. A team led by Randy Cook performed the animation using both motion capture data and manual recreation of Serkis's facial reference. [87] Gollum's CG model was redesigned using a subdivision surface model instead of the NURBS model for Fellowship (a similar rebuild was done for the digital doubles of the lead actors) to better resemble Serkis. This allowed the filmmakers to create a shot where Serkis, made-up to resemble Gollum, is believably replaced with the CG Gollum. The original model can still be glimpsed briefly in the first film. Over Christmas 2001, the crew proceeded to reanimate all the previous shots accordingly. Another problem was that the crew realized that the cast performed better in the versions of the film when Serkis was present. In the end, the CG Gollum was often animated on top of these scenes, and Serkis was painted out. Shots such as his crawling with more than human skill down a sheer cliff were shot with no live reference. Serkis did motion-capture for the character to drive the body of the model, whilst animators created the finger and facial movements. Gino Acevedo supervised realistic skin tones, which for the first time used subsurface scattering shader, taking four hours per frame to render. Render time refers to the amount of time it took the computer to process the image into a usable format; it does not include the amount of time it took the texture artists to "draw" the frame. [87] The hair dynamics of CG Gollum in The Two Towers were generated using Maya Cloth. Because of its technical limitations, Weta subsequently moved to the Syflex system for The Return of the King. [88]
Because the Nazgûl or Ringwraiths were turned to wraith-like versions of their former terrible selves, they were portrayed by tall, slim actors wearing prosthetics and costumes. Filmed on a studio set, the settings and appearances of the Ringwraiths were later edited to look chaotic and terrible. [80] Besides Weathertop, many scenes in The Lord of the Rings trilogy were shot in this way, first by filming the scenery or set miniatures, then the actors on a green-screen studio set, and merging the two. [89] In the Mines of Moria, Gandalf has a scene combined with computer graphics as he grapples with the Balrog as they fall to their deaths. [90]
Christoper Hery (ILM), Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri (both Weta and previously ILM) received a 2003 Academy Award, Scientific or Technical for implementing the BSSRDF technique used for Gollum's skin in a production environment. [91] Henrik Wann Jensen (Stanford University), Stephen Robert Marschner (Cornell University and previously Stanford University), and Pat Hanrahan (Stanford University) (but not the fourth coauthor Marc Levoy), who developed BSSRDF, won another the same year. [92]
Weta developed a variety of software approaches, including the MASSIVE crowd simulation for battle sequences, to create the many special effects used in the films. [93] [81] Stephen Regelous developed MASSIVE in 1996. [86] It offers a large number of choices for each software agent to pick when inside a digital arena. Catherine Thiel provided the movements of each type of soldier, like the unique fighting styles (designed by Tony Wolf) or fleeing. [85]
While Jackson insisted on using miniatures where possible, sometimes shots became too difficult for that, primarily with the digital characters. Sometimes natural elements like cloud, dust and fire (which was used as the electronic data for the Wraithworld scenes and the Balrog) were composited, [86] as were natural environments for the Pelennor Fields. [81] To give a "painterly" look to the films, cinematographer Peter Doyle worked on every scene within the computer to strengthen colours and add extra mood and tone to the proceedings. Gold was tinted into Hobbiton, whilst cooler colours were strengthened into Lothlórien, Moria and Helm's Deep. [86] Such a technique took 2–3 weeks to do, and allowed some freedom with the digital source for some extra editing. [94]
The Return of the King used RealFlow software to simulate the molten lava into which Gollum sinks inside Mount Doom. [95]
Wellington's Weta Workshop. The Academy Award-winning creative design and physical effects facility is best known for its work on The Lord of the Rings
Jackson had not seen the film from beginning to end until yesterday
To Christophe Hery, Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri for their groundbreaking implementations of practical methods for rendering skin and other translucent materials using subsurface scattering techniques.
To Henrik Wann Jensen, Stephen R. Marschner and Pat Hanrahan for their pioneering research in simulating subsurface scattering of light in translucent materials as presented in their paper "A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport".
"Return of the King". In one of the last scenes, Gollum falls into a sea of lava clutching the ring in his hand. He sinks slowly beneath the surface of the viscous, incandescent liquid holding the treasured ring aloft. The scene lasts only a few seconds, but it took at least two people a month's work to make, and many, many equations to simulate the movement of the lava by means of computer. Curiously, the firm responsible for this scene is Spanish; "Next Limit", ... As the founder and general manager of the company, Víctor González, explains, to reproduce lava realistically by computer they used a tool they have developed themselves, RealFlow, which is based on the Langrangian mathematical method or fluid simulation by particles.