Wondering how they are going to use CGI in the huge battle scenes? 'Alain' interviewed Peter Jackson himself not too long ago and learned the following:

....My magazine is a newszine called Science-Fiction Magazine. It's 84 pages quadri with a printing of 65000 copies. It's the one and prime (a.k.a. only) SF mag in France. We also tackle subjects such as Fantasy, Horror, and the Fantastique...

I'm not too sure regarding your whereabouts... But, if you're familiar with the british SFX, well, we sort of look a bit like them.

Weta is Peter Jackson sfx company based in New Zealand. Massive is a software created by Weta geeks. As you surely know, there will be 15,000 extras (non talking parts) involved in the movie The LotR. Thanks to 'Massive', these extras will be digitalized and reproduced so as to have some 200,000 characters in the battle scenes. The + thing is that the battle will run randomly. That is: no one single character is programmed according to Peter's will. The computer will rule them all and decide on its own who dies, who lives, what form of action it performs. And if Jackson goes for another shot, it will not reproduce the same pattern....

Massive is the software that Weta FX has designed to handle the battle CGI. Wow, being a former Computer Science major, that software appears to be very powerful! I wonder what kind of systems they use to run the battles?