Special effects are now a central part of the moviemaking process. But as audiences demand more, effects houses are being forced to ramp up their processing power like never before. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films are packed with epic battles. Behind the scenes, however, another struggle was going on. As each movie in the trilogy went into production, visual effects studio Weta Digital scrambled to add the processing power needed to render an increasing number of computationally intensive special effects shots. [More]