Gandalf & Saruman at SLCC 2013

SALT LAKE CITY — Once scheduled for a smaller venue in the suburbs, the first ever Salt Lake Comic Con filled Utah’s capital city’s largest convention venue and had it bursting at the seams Saturday. For a time the hundreds waiting outside were not allowed to enter except at a 1-out-1-in rate. Word on the dealer’s floor said it was because the fire marshal closed the space but that rumor was never confirmed.

Reports in the media called the event “record setting” for a first-year convention, and that is possibly true, but such stats aren’t readily available. In any case, it was a massive event with celebrities that included William Kircher (Bifur) and Manu Bennett (Azog) and other pop-culture icons like William Shatner and Adam West.

Azog at Weta booth, Salt Lake Comic Con 2013

TheOneRing.net was part of the fun as well, with staffer (and this writer) Larry D. Curtis (MrCere) attending with the show in his (my) hometown. the SLComic Con invited TORn to present a panel about Smaug and serve on other panels as well, with topics including Fantasy Films, all things Tolkien, Geek Culture and film school.

Bennett and Kircher were kind enough to drop by TheOneRing panel that also included author and TORn friend Paul Genesse. He helped moderate the panel and showed incredible enthusiasm for the material.

TheOneRing also managed a booth on the at time very crowded floor supported by incredible friends at Badali Jewelry and Weta Workshop making its first U.S. appearance outside of the San Diego Comic Con. TORn helped back in a small way to staff the Weta booth and send those with questions about where to purchase The One Ring to Badali’s very nearby booth. Artist David Powell was also kind enough to sign posters of his art for fans.

The Salt Palace Convention Center can be expanded and the SLCC will return next year. TheOneRing.net hopes to be part of the show. Thanks to Dan McBride and Blonde Ninja for their support of the TORn booth. Thanks also to the many financial supports at the event and to Salt Lake Comic Con for letting us be a part of the show. If you attended and would like TORn to return, you can use the contact info here to let them know.

If anybody has images of Bennett and Kircher attending the TORn panel, please send them in! We were busy having a panel and didn’t get any photos.

Thanks to Ringer Rud the Spud for the link.

The standard-issue Star Trek Into Darkness Blu-ray comes with a mere seven featurettes in the US. But there’s much more content out there! Buy the movie from iTunes and you get the director’s commentary; buy it from BestBuy (or Sainsburys, in the UK) and you get another selection of exclusive extras; buy it from Target and you get a few more.

If you’re a US completist, in other words, you’re going to need quite a few copies. Here in the UK, it appears that we get six featurettes, and if you want the commentary there’s a code for you to download it free from iTunes. People are riled, and on some level one has to wonder: are the studios intentionally throwing Blu-ray under a bus? Have they given up on the format?

This isn’t the first time this has happened with a major release. Avengers had extra bells and whistles at Bestbuy and Walmart, but those were slightly less essential extras than a commentary (the fact that the UK’s still waiting for Whedon’s commentary on that title is another disgrace).

If you’re a film fan and could only choose one feature, chances are it would be the commentary, so this drive to make that a hard-to-get rarity is – frankly – a terrible one. In a very good recent article on the movie Clue, director Jonathan Lynn mentions that he offered to record a commentary for its Blu-ray release and was turned down by the studio.

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Pre-order your copy of the AUJ: EE at Amazon

The New Zealand public has essentially lost access to Wellington’s Town Hall while the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra records the score for the second Hobbit movie.

The orchestra last month cancelled its Heights of Passion tour to free up time to record the score.

In a public notice today, Wellington City Council announced ”strict security” was in place at the Town Hall from now until the end of next month while the orchestra records the film score.

There will be no public access during this time, the notice said.

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Since I had so little direct linguistic information about Black Speech to go on other than what could be gleaned from the Ring-inscription (object suffixes -ul, -ulûk; verbal infinitive (perhaps) ending -at; abstract ending -um in burzum “darkness”, containing the same burz element seen in Lugbúrz “Dark Tower”; postposition -ishi “in”) I had to go on à priori notions of what a language such as Black Speech might be like — I had to get inside the mind of Sauron, and try to figure out what somebody like the Dark Lord of Mordor might put into his language.

As a matter of fact, this is something I had thought about some years before. As an undergraduate in college, I had contributed to a set of ongoing stories, where each participant wrote additional chapters and introduced characters and events as he or she pleased. Into one of these stories I introduced the character (played partly for humor, partly tragically) of a misfit Orc who, sometime after the fall of Mordor, had found himself transported through time and space into a new environment. On introducing this Orc, I thought it would add a touch of realism to let him speak in his own language; so I sketched the outline of what I imagined Black Speech might be like, and wrote a couple of paragraphs in it.

I have no idea if any copy of this text survives somewhere in my files. At any rate, I made no direct use of it, except for one small element that I retained in memory, the first person pronoun za — possibly suggested by Avestan azəm.

What I did retain, however, was the overall notion of Black Speech as a complex but consistent language, rich in affixation and inflection, but with a wholly transparent morphology. Indeed, the transparency of the morphology, the lack of any phonetic alterations between morphemes that could obscure the structure, would help explain the prevalence of clashing consonant clusters; morphemes ending in one consonant were jammed up against morphemes beginning in another, with nothing to ease the transition.

Sauron, I imagined, was an enormously practical person, who would have made the Black Speech as “perfect” (according to his notions of perfection) as he could make it, with a rigorous consistency and logic, but without making any allowance for æsthetics. It would not eschew borrowings from other languages of Middle-earth, but it would adapt them to its own style. It would in fact have been, as my friend Helge Fauskanger terms it, Sauron’s Esperanto.

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For more details, read the article here.

The producer behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy wants to shoot a $100 million Viking blockbuster in Norway, saying he is drawn by the “authentic landscape” and the expert knowledge local historians have about the Viking era.

Barrie Osbourne, who was also behind the Matrix films, said that he wanted to make a trilogy following the story of Harald Hardrada, the last great Viking king, who died in his attempt to conquer England in 1066.

“The movie will be about how Harald evolved from a teenager to a great leader who rallied his kingdom,” Osbourne told Stavanger Aftenbladet. “There is so much to tell about Harald that it does not fit in one movie. We need to create a trilogy. It will have the same structure as “Lord of the Rings”, where the hero travels through many countries and kingdoms.”

It was unclear whether the proposed film was the same project as a Harald Hardrada film starring Leonardo diCaprio which was reported earlier this month.

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The day-to-day operation of the website, and the events we host, require a lot more resources than when we first started nearly 15 years ago. We sometimes find it hard to ask our readers for the help we need to keep running, so we began discussing what it is that makes TheOneRing.net worth helping out. It started out as a search for the Top Ten Moments of TORn, but the list got so long because each staff member had their own idea of important moments in TORn history. Here, instead, is something more encompassing: Ten Ways TORn helps serve Tolkien and Lord of the Rings fandom (listed in no specific order).

And, if you enjoy what we do, consider a donation (no amount too small, because every bit does help!) to keep us running!

If you can’t, that’s fine as well — keep reading, commenting and contributing. Because TORn is as much you as it is us!

If you’ve ever sent in an article, submitted a photo or report, posted on our messageboards, visited our chat, or commented on our twitter, facebook or g+, you’re the reason TheOneRing.net is among the largest and most-respected pillars of the Tolkien community on the web.

• Spy Reports

• Spy reports were a big part of our content when the website first started. From casting announcements to secret location pictures to leaked images of important plot points, spy reports were our bread and butter stories. Some of the reports were from random, anonymous sources, while others were official leaks from cast and crew. In fact, there were many production members who said they used TheOneRing.net to keep track of what some of the other filming units were doing. Other spy reports were just someone stumbling upon a film location and sending in a story or images and then we’d all try and guess what location it actually was. Some of our biggest spy reports were of Arwen at Helm’s Deep (which subsequently didn’t happen), Saruman’s prone body on a spiky wheel (which did happen), and TheOneRing.net was given the honor of introducing Thorin to the world. And very soon, we will be seeing stories from MrCere’s visit to the set from his Production Embed last year.

• Hall of Fire Chats and the Message Boards

• Literary discussions on the message boards and Hall of Fire chats – From the very beginning of TheOneRing.net, discussions of the books, chapter by chapter, has been a hallmark. After all, while we waited for news on who would be cast, where filming would take place, and rumors of what might be cut out, we had the books to talk about. Discussions worked by talking about one chapter at a time, and luckily, there are enough books with enough chapters, to keep those discussions going on for a long while. Since the beginning, we’ve looped through the books several times, but luckily, there are always new readers joining the discussion, and new interpretations to be had. And for something a little more dynamic, there are the Hall of Fire chats in Barlimans. Sometimes the talk is about a specific chapter, or a certain character, and sometimes it is about current events, such as new character images or reviews of a recently released trailer. No matter which forum you use, there is always someone to talk to about some aspect of Tolkien, the books or our fandom.

• TORns Live Videos

• We began with TORn Live, which consisted of Red Carpet interviews at premieres, awards ceremonies and special events like Cannes 2001 and SDCC. These would be recorded, edited and released online a few days or weeks later. But technology now allows for live streaming interviews and vlogs and the like. Quickbeam hosts a weekly TORn Tuesday event with interviews and discussions, while he interacts with a live chatroom. The Happy Hobbit ladies record and post their vlogs and post them within a day or two of their recordings, for a much quicker turnaround on video content. And right now we have the Road to DragonCon in full swing with live streaming from across the country.

• Conventions

• Convention appearances – Calisuri and Quickbeam hosted a panel at San Diego Comic Con in 2001, before the release of FOTR, and since then barely a year has gone by that TORn hasn’t had a presence at at least one convention. At many of the conventions we appear at we also have a presence on the exhibit hall floor where we have sold some of our classic TORn shirts. We love it when we get up on stage for a panel and half the people in the audience are wearing some of our older shirts.

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  Baggins Birthday Party sign

  Line Parties and Fan Events

• Line Parties and other fan hosted events – TheOneRing.net has always been a grass roots type of fan-site and that is no more apparent then looking at the Line Parties of years past. Whether it is just a few friends, or some hundreds of people signing up on the website to attend, fans like you all over the world hosted Line Parties. A few even took place over several days, and included costume contests and trivia games for prizes. Other fan hosted events over the years have been the Hobbit Day/Baggins Birthday Bash events on Sept. 22, the Tolkien Toast on Jan. 3 and the Tolkien Reading Day on March 25. TORn staff in Los Angeles have been hosting a Baggins Birthday Bash party for 11 years now, but there are fan groups around the world that have hosted similar events. Smaller moots happen around the world all the time, there is a very active group in Wellington and one in Croatia. If you are hosting a fan event in the next year or two, please feel free to tell us about it.

• The Oscar Parties

• Originally conceived as a fan event to help raise funds to buy TORn a new server, who could have imagined the Cast and Crew actually showing up to the FOTR oscar party? Even more surprising, who could have imagined the ROTK sweep and all those Oscars on stage at a fan hosted party?

• O.R.C and E.L.F.

• TheOneRing.net hosted conventions – The One Ring Celebration on the West Coast (O.R.C.) and the Eastern Lord of the Rings Festival on the East Coast (E.L.F.) were co-productions with a professional convention company, but they definitely had a TORn stamp on them. The conventions allowed us to combine our love of the films by interacting with cast and crew with our love of the books through academic discussions, the art shows and costume displays. We really did break the mold on how a commercial scifi convention is run and hope everyone who attended had a blast.

• Academic essays and editorials

• TORn has long standing relationships with many in the academic community who have posted guest essays and editorials. Over the year several staffers have posted in depth analysis to fan questions on the site as well. In fact, we have a whole section on the ‘old TORn’ (pre-crash) called Green Books for academic posts. This section had so much good stuff in it, we published a book called “The People’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien” and a sequel book as well.

• Driving fan initiatives

• After Return of the King was done and Peter Jackson moved on to do King Kong, the fans waited to see what would happen with The Hobbit afterwards. Months turned to years and still no word while studios went bankrupt, copyrights issues got tangled up and various lawsuits were filed for missing payments. Finally, a few fans decided they had had enough and started a petition to ‘Make the Hobbit Happen’. They brought it to TORn and we got thousands of you to sign so that a big pile of names was delivered to TPTB. A similar thing happened when there was talk that the production would be moved out of New Zealand. The fans could see no where else as Middle-earth, so the ‘Keep the Hobbit in NZ’ campaign was born, but this time on Social Media. And most recently, there was an explosion of Tolkien fan love over the #Votebilbo twitter event prompted by an MTV Audience Award.

• TORn Community

• This list compiles many of the things that TheOneRing.net does to keep you informed, entertained and engaged, but there is really just one thing that makes TheOneRing.net so important to keep around. And that is the community of fans that convene on our message boards, in Barliman’s chat, on Facebook and Twitter.

This site was built by fans getting together to discuss what they hoped for from Peter Jackson long before FOTR ever saw the light of day. The fact that a long existing fan-base gathered here meant engaged and informed discussion began from day one, including analyzing all the spy reports about casting and location details. We didn’t have to wait for the release of the films, or for several episodes of a new show to take off before we could discuss the minutia of every detail because our fan base was already well established.

And what is ‘fandom’ if not a community of like minded people passionate about the same thing. Sure, everyone has their own opinions, so every time a new image was released, or a new trailer appeared, the message boards and chatroom erupted into heated discussions. But as the years wore on friendships were made, some turning into marriage, and we all began meeting up at various moots, conventions, concerts, premiere events, trips to New Zealand or just coffee and a movie. How many of you newer fans were galvanized by the #Votebilbo campaign and now have a wider array of Twitter friends because of it? The fact that TORn was able to continue to exist during all those lean years between film productions is due mostly to you, the readers, sticking around to discuss anything and everything to do with Tolkien, and sometimes other bits of pop culture. We know that after the release of The Hobbit: There and Back Again we will see another decline of readership, but we also know that the community is strong, the friendships have been forged and all of you take that fandom with you where ever you go next.

So again, if you are so inclined to help support us and keep the website going, please do make a pledge or bid on one of the many cool auction items we’ve been posting about the past few days. On behalf of the All Volunteer Staff at TheOneRing.net, you have our deepest gratitude for all the support over the years.

He writes:

I still can’t answer many Hobbit questions, but for the time being, feel free to post them here and I’ll do the best I can!

I haven’t had time to scan the entire thread, but here are a couple of interesting snippets.

leitmotifs don’t always merely echo what’s on the screen. (Or in opera, what’s on the stage.) Sometimes they’re providing additional information — foreshadowing, plot threads, subtexts, etc. It’s always worth bearing this in mind. After all, what is dramatic music accomplishing if it’s limited to a strict redundancy of what’s already meeting the eye?

Question: While we are at it – what meaning does the Ringwraith theme have in TH: AUJ finale?

Nice try!

The implication — although Adams cannot say — seems to be that there is some string of relevance between Azog and the Nazgul.

Yes, there was less choral work in AUJ than in the LOTR films, but I think that has much to do with its distinct tone.

Question: Is it possible anything from the theatrical edition music will be changed for the extended cut. For instance in FOTR, Frodo’s run down to Gandalf at the beginning is muted in original while it has music in the EE. Or will any of the music already in the film for parts, be altered? I’ll say it upfront: I’m guessing you can’t answer.

Good guess. You’ll see in a few weeks/months why I had to sign so many NDAs for the EE.

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The Society’s Lumiere statuettes for technology will be awarded to Weta Digital for the visual effects pipeline it created for Avatar; and to Park Road Post for the 3D high frame rate pipeline it developed for The Hobbit.

Related, a Lumiere will also be awarded to manufacturer SGO for its Mistika postproduction system, which was a key tool used at Park Road Post for its 3D high frame rate pipeline.

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