TORN Staffer Ostadan writes: Fantasy Flight Games, who pretty much own all the licenses for Tolkien-themed boardgames in the U.S., have announced a new game to be released in late 2008, “Middle-Earth Quest”. The press release doesn’t give a hint as to what _kind_ of boardgame it will be, nor who the designer is, but indicates that players will be represented by individual character types, during the years prior to the main action of Lord of the Rings. [More]
Month: August 2007
Lee writes: In this week’s New Yorker magazine there is a very long article on Ian McKellen. There’s only a mention of his role as Gandalf; they aren’t really interested in that. But for his fans, or those interested in the theatre or acting, this article seems like a must-read. It has a lot of information and analysis I haven’t seen in other pieces on him. Their web site has a picture of the issue, and its table of contents, but to read the article you need to buy the magazine. [More]
Proving his acting repertoire is not restricted to the highbrow, Sir Ian McKellen is planning to make a brief appearance in popular Kiwi soap Shortland Street. McKellen has been playing the title role of King Lear in Auckland with the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of a five-nation tour but is hoping to swap his crown for hospital scrubs on the “Shortie” set on Monday, The New Zealand Herald reported on Saturday. The 68-year-old star, who played Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, may appear in a walk-on role, possibly as a nurse or hospital cleaner, after saying he had always wanted to star in the medical drama. [More]
Christopher Coleman from tracksounds.com writes: Just thought you’d like to mobilize the LOTR fans to help vote Howard Shore’s LOTR scores as the “best of all time.” Of course the competition is tough: Star Wars, Braveheart, Lawrence of Arabia, The Magnificent Seven, The Godfather…and many other classic film scores. The voting is happening at tracksounds.com.
For years speculation has raged that director Peter Jackson was making a World War I movie. Then secretly, in April this year, he did. The film, Crossing the Line, features biplane dogfights, bayonet charges and 30 cast and crew. It was filmed in Jackson’s second home-town of Masterton – home to his palatial mansion and estate – and has had rave reviews at audience screenings. It’s length? Fifteen minutes. Time taken to shoot? Just a few days. [More]
The technology that brought Gollum to life in the Lord of the Rings movies is now being used to treat injuries. Until recently, wound care nurses had to rely on their eyes and their memory to monitor progress, commonly injecting probes to test the depth of a wound. But now it is all hands off. The Silhouette Mobile uses lasers to record not only a wound’s width, but its depth. The measurements are stored on the camera’s computer and then compared to previous recordings, mapping the wounds exact progress. [More]