TheOneRing.net, with major sponsor The Lord of the Rings: War in the North on board, is heading to DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia, via the roadways of America and broadcasting the event LIVE on TORn. Along the way we are taking our little Gandalf to get lots of photos with him and to meet TORn readers in a few cities along the way before we hand him off in Atlanta and send him to Europe!. (More about Gandalf soon as we unveil the whole project with a new website dedicated just to getting the statue in the hands of fans for photos and to “handoff the Gandalf.” Our trip is corporately sponsored by The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, releasing November 1st in North America. Other sponsor’s include everybody’s favorite LOTR jeweler Badali Jewelry and “The Website for People Who Love Britain,” Anglotopia.
Kiwi PyCon 2011, New Zealand’s conference dedicated to the Python programming language, is on this weekend at Te Whaea in Wellington. With a great lineup of speakers from Weta Digital, GitHub, a strong local and overseas contingent, as well as three international keynotes, there is still time to participate in this fantastic conference. More..
Sylvester McCoy, Radagast the Brown in the two upcoming films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, has been added as a guest to the annual celebration of popular culture known as DragonCon. Ralph Bakshi is also a guest and of course TheOneRing.net is also attending as it has for the last decade and we will make every effort to catch a chat with McCoy.
He is best known as the seventh Doctor Who but has worked extensively on the stage and in television. It is not yet known if he will appear as part of the Tolkien Track of programming (but he is more than welcome to take the stage during either of the two TORn panels on The Hobbit) but he will doubtless be asked a few Middle-earth questions even if he is involved with Doctor Who content.
Expect a lot more DragonCon content from TORn through the conclusion of the convention including the TORn road trip to DragonCon. Continue reading “Sylvester McCoy added as DragonCon guest”
TheOneRing.net is planning a road trip to DragonCon 2011 in Atlanta GA, and we are looking for a few financial sponsors to make it happen! The plan is to leave Los Angeles on Aug 30th, shoot up to Salt Lake City, and then direct non-stop (except for bathroom breaks) to DragonCon! The best part is we’ll be LIVE the entire time on Stickam.com, thanks to an amazing new piece of technology that should keep us connected the entire trip. If you would like to sponsor our efforts (gas, food, etc), please email us directly at advertising@theonering.net. It is a great opportunity to get your company out in front of a worldwide Tolkien audience, and participate in a worldwide first – We believe this is the first time anyone has streamed LIVE across the country!
Fans of The Lord of the Rings films already know that Andy Serkis can act his face off and act without ever showing his face. He first proved it with his landmark performance of Gollum in The Two Towers. Film making and acting without a net, portions of the film hinged on Serkis’ performance of a creature and Weta Digital’s ability to put the emotion on screen digitally. It worked. Beyond all expectations, it soared.
When the screenwriters threw in some character twists of the twisted character for Return of the King (for good or for ill, but don’t blame the actor) Serkis did it again. And of course his return as the same character to The Hobbit is as essential a tie between the films as any character. He went from Middle-earth to Monster Island with King Kong and even got to die a horrible death in his own skin on screen.
Weta went on to create Pandora and its blue skinned inhabitants with James Cameron in Avatar then teamed up again on Tintin with Serkis playing a human in the hilarious Captain Haddock.
