Andreas writes: According to Swedens number 1 newspaper TTT made about 9 million sek($1 million) on its opening day which is 38% more then FOTR., which makes it the highest grossing movie ever in Sweden beating last years record breaker FOTR which grossed 290 million kroner (29 million USD) on it’s release date.
Day: December 21, 2002
A gallery in Santa Monica, California is hosting a collection of the Brothers Hildebrandt, featuring Tolkien-inspired pictures. [More]
Bill writes: Jim Rygiel and Randall Cook spoke at a session at the Australian Effects and Animation Festival at the beginning of this month. [More]
A gallery in Santa Moncia, California, called “Every Picture Tells A Story… ” will be hosting a new major exhibit, “The Brothers Hildebrandt: Tolkien Art”…running January 18 through February 18. Over 30 Lord of the Rings paintings will be on display, as well as over 60 rarely seen sketches, studies and prints. Greg and Tim Hildebrandt will be appearing in person on Saturday. January 18 from 2 to 4 PM at the gallery.
Every Picture Tells A Story, which showcases the original art and prints from illustrated books, is located at 1318 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Phone is (310)451-2700 and online at Everypicture.com
Look out for two quick appearances by Peter Jackson in TTT. One is amongst the crowd of wild men, as they run towards the camera after Saruman’s pep talk; the other is on the wall of Helm’s Deep. Nikolaj writes: “As the Uruk-Hais are trying to batter down the gate to the castle, the defenders open some sort of shutters and hurl rocks at the attackers.PJ is one of the rock-hurlers. You see him briefly. He is carrying a piece chain armor not only covering the body but also with a kind of hood.” Others have reported this too, thank you all.
Bill writes:
Jim Rygiel and Randall Cook spoke at a session at the Australian Effects and Animation Festival at the beginning of this month. During this session where they spoke to a (slightly disappointed) audience about the effects they used in FOTR, as they were unable to show any TTT footage before the release of the movie.
They mentioned that they were working on the DVD versions of TTT, and had an extra 120 shots they were working on. (I don’t know if they are going to release the same type of DVDs as in FOTR: first the cinema release, then an extended release later in the year, but I would expect so.) This means devoted fans should be able to again see more of the film that was allowable by New Line in their three hour limit on the theatrical release.
Some extra information that they did have was that since every shot in the TTT movie is digitally manipulated to some extent (compared to 70% or FOTR), they have the whole movie online and will try to use this digital version to create the DVD instead of another conversion process from film.
Other pieces of information: the have about 100 Terabytes of ‘near-line’ (automated data tape archive) with a lot of archived early work saved, instead of just the final masters. Jim (or was it Randall) pulled out their sample shots out of this archive for their talk just before travelling to Australia. It was amazing to see how many old animation versions are stored somewhere in their systems.
Some of the material they talked about used in the official web site Effects pages, but a lot of their talk covered the FOTR Cave Troll and the Bridge scenes. Some of the scenes they were working on for TTT and ROTK were taking up to 2-3 hours per frame, and that is using about 1400 CPUs in their render farm.