It’s almost October already – and that means New York ComicCon is almost upon us! As ever, TORn will be there.
You can find us at the convention at Booth 3040 – same spot as last year! We’ll have t-shirts, buttons, lanyards and more for sale, as well as the usual cool giveaways and fun stuff. We’re not giving a panel this year – instead, we’re hosting a ‘forum/discussion group’, on Friday 9th Oct 4-5pm. We’ll be chatting and reminiscing about the seventeen years which have flown by, since Peter Jackson got going on pre-production for his Lord of the Rings trilogy and TORn was founded. Come and share your memories of this unexpected journey! Venue TBA – we’ll let you know asap, and hope you can join us! (We very well may also include some gossip on just what might be in the Extended Edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies…)
Continue reading “New York ComicCon – party with TheOneRing.net and WETA!”
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We had a fantastic time at last weekend’s Wizard World San Jose. Thanks so much to everyone who made the effort to come out and join us!
Our panel, Happy Hobbit: The World Ahead, was a delight on Friday afternoon. In keeping with our theme, there was lots of laughter and learning. It’s always very rewarding to meet people who watch our show and fellow Tolkien-fans in general. In addition to geeky fun, several creatives also turned out, curious to hear about my experience with writing as K.M. Rice and to see Fili’s love of capturing the moment with Alexandra Rice Photography. We can only hope that Tolkien would’ve been proud to see just how much creativity and inspiration people have found in his Middle-earth, leading them to their own unique forms of self-expression. Like Bilbo, many of us artists just need a little nudge out the door onto our own roads! You can watch our panel in it’s entirety here:
The short film that we debuted, Wildling, which we made together as a sister team over the summer, can be watched here (in a bit better quality than what you can see in this panel footage!).
Following the panel, we had time to sweep through the showroom floor before heading over to the Hilton’s Affinity restaurant for some hobbity and dwarven hijinks that made our panel look like a calm and composed event. TORn staffter Garfeimao and her sister, Carynn Hobbit, were in attendance, along with several friends, some old and some we’d only met that day! The following afternoon was none other than Billy Boyd’s (Pippin in LOTR and lead vocals in the band beecake) hilarious Q & A panel.
As always with our show, our goal is to make episodes that help you feel like you were at these events, even if you were only present in spirit, so feel free to prop up your feet and enjoy Wizard World San Jose by watching the video below!
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Not going to Dragon*Con? Live on the west coast? Need something Middle-earthy to do this weekend that includes two dwarves and a hobbit? Then look no further than the San Jose Wizard World!
The Tolkien festivities will kick off Friday with a Happy Hobbit panel, followed by a “moot,” or Entish get-together, across the street from the convention center at the Affinity Restaurant at the Hilton. Even if you’re not attending the con on Friday, be sure to join us at the moot for some Middle-earth madness, which is prone to happen whenever Fili and Kili are around.
Saturday is your opportunity to meet Billy Boyd (Pippin) and ask him anything at his panel, which will undoubtedly be comic gold and of course, very informative.
Below are the specifics of each event:
SAN JOSE WIZARD WORLD COMIC CON
San Jose Convention Center
150 West San Carlos St., San Jose, California 95113
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4TH, 2015
PANEL
6:00 – 6:45PM HAPPY HOBBIT: THE WORLD AHEAD (ROOM 211AB)
“Home is behind, the world ahead, and there are many paths to tread…” – J.R.R. Tolkien
Join sisters Kellie and Alex Rice (Kili and Fili of the webseries Happy Hobbit) as they go beyond the shire to explore how their geeky roots have blossomed into creative careers. Kellie is also known as K.M. Rice, an author and screenwriter who has worked for both Weta Workshop and Magic Leap, while Alex produces shows and shorts and has her own photography business. Both are excited to share tips on self-publishing, low-budget films, and engaging an online audience.
MOOT 7:30 PM
Affinity Restaurant at the San Jose Hilton.
Hilton San Jose, 300 S Almaden Blvd, San Jose, CA 95113
No reservation, we’ll just take over Dwarf-style!
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5TH, 2015
PANEL
12:30 – 1:15PM ADVENTURES IN MIDDLE EARTH WITH BILLY BOYD (ROOM 210)
“Lord of the Rings” fans rejoice! Billy Boyd (Peregrin ‘Pippin’ Took) has traveled far and wide to join us for this very special Wizard World Q&A! This is your opportunity to ask Billy about his life, career, and where his adventures will be taking him next! You don’t want to miss this awesome panel!
Billy is also a member of the band beecake, and anyone who has heard either Pippin singing in the LOTR films or “The Last Goodbye” as the credits rolled on Middle-earth with BoTFA this winter knows that he’s more than worth listening to.
Here’s to hoping we’ll see more than less than half of you as we’d expect, and that you all have more than half the fun that you deserve!
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He made his debut at Comic-Con last year and after a decade wait to get him into our collections Faramir has arrived. This amazing statue is a spitting image of what we saw on screen during The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Faramir is one of my favorite The Lord of the Rings pieces and you can get him right now for $249 as he is in-stock with an edition size of just 1000 pieces world-wide.
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As many of you already know, there is sad news in our community of fans today: Sir Christopher Lee passed away Sunday morning at the age of 93 due to respiratory problems and heart failure. Of course, we all came to know and love him for his role as the evil wizard, Saruman, in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, a role that came at the end of a long, and very distinguished career as an actor in horror movies and other dramas. For many of us, it’s difficult to picture a better Count Dracula than Christopher Lee. But, for many more of us, it’s impossible to think of anyone else playing the role of Saruman. All of the professionalism, passion and dedication of his long career shone out in that role, making it perfection.
From the U.K. telegraph website, here is a nice obituary, and a short video of his career highlights. Námarië, Sir Christopher. You are dearly loved and will be dearly missed!
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HobbitCon 3 took place just a couple weeks ago in Germany and our friends at Henneth-Annun were on-hand to get the low-down.
They’ve compiled an extensive English-language report on the three-day convention, as well as many quotes from Q&A panels featuring Luke Evans, Graham McTavish, Sylvester McCoy, Lawrence Makaore, John Bell and more.
Don’t forget to click the link at the bottom to read the complete report.
Enjoy!
HobbitCon 3: third time’s a charm!
by Peter “TheHutt” Klassen
I do remember the very first HobbitCon. When FedCon GmbH, the organizing company, announced a new convention during the RingCon 2012 dedicated exclusively to “The Hobbit”, with the participation of 11 dwarves from Thorin’s Company (although two of them cancelled later), I didn’t know what to think about it. That was even before the first movie from PJ’s second trilogy was released, and the dwarf actors were only known to us from the director’s video blogs. And in fact, the first HobbitCon proved to be a commercial failure, though it had a very pleasant and homely atmosphere.
Luckily, the organizers didn’t give up, and the second HobbitCon fared much better than the first one. And now, after the third HobbitCon (christened by Mark Ferguson “HobbitCon DREI”, which is German for “three”) has passed, you can really tell that there was barely room to swing a cat. If the first HobbitCon had just 800 visitors during the weekend, the third one had 5500 guests from over 27 countries! The Maritim hotel in Bonn was bursting, and the amount of Fili & Kili cosplay couples was staggering.
Speaking objectively, the HobbitCon is a unique event in the whole world. International conventions usually work with several mixed genres, there are many different fandoms present at a convention, with each fandom represented by just one or two actors. These are giant commercial vehicles, with an airplane hangar-like atmosphere. The HobbitCon is very different. You do not need to stay in a line overnight to get into a Q&A panel hall. You can be partying in a bar and suddenly find yourself on the dance floor together with Graham McTavish, Jed Brophy or even Luke Evans. Of course it is not for free – but still, three days of positive emotions, homely atmosphere and the feeling that the movie actors have become your friends, are worth it.
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It’s almost October already – and that means New York ComicCon is almost upon us! As ever, TORn will be there.
