Will writes: They just showed a section of Richard Taylor’s talk at Innovate NZ workshop today. They only showed some of it and most of it just touch on some behind the scenes things. They showed some footage of their work, but didn’t show any Two Towers footage.
Here’s just a brief summary of what he talked about.
He started off talking about how they had tried to keep all the effects/art departments (5 different depts altogether) as one so everything would work as one. He talked about the innovation that went into Massive and how it works (I didn’t know that the ‘soldiers’ actually got bloodier and dirtier the longer they fought). He joked about the fact that most chain mail is actually knitted and how they actually employed an old ladies (65+) knitting club to come into the workshop. On location they actually dug up a section of the earth and used the colour pigment to dirty up the actors based on each location, to make it seem more real as opposed to clean looking Hollywood style medieval. Also when doing the effects they wanted to make the image expand past the frame, so you believed the world actually existed.
Some of the figures while making the film:
48,000 props (includes everything)
10,000 facial applications
1800 hobbit feet just for the 4 main hobbits
10,000 arrows
The rest was about innovation behind the company and the people involved. Overall an interesting little speech, just a shame he didn’t offer any new information about LOTRs.
