Where do Tolkien fans gather on Tuesdays for the hottest live chat “call-in” show covering all things Hobbity? Join the fun with TORn Tuesdays LIVE with Quickbeam! Be part of our live streaming show with Cliff offering analysis and wild speculation about the set report from Ain’t It Cool News, as well as a tidbit of inside information about a casting in The Hobbit for “The Old Bellringer” who warns the Men of Laketown of that dratted fire-drake!
Chat with folks in Barliman’s chat room LIVE and we can even bring you in via Skype. Check out the broadcast in our LIVE Event section right here every week: 5:00pm Pacific Daylight Time!
I stumbled on this short story on Weta and about the chainmaille process. It’s not news, but it is nerdily interesting.
We’ve been talking chainmaille with Emily. These days she’s the Make-Up and Hair Department co-ordinator, but we knew she was one of the pioneers in the chainmaille department and spent a long time putting an unfathomable amount of rings together for the costumes for The Lord of the Rings. Find out what it’s like to put together 5-10,000 rings. Per day. [READ MORE]
Thanks to The Hobbit, New Zealand’s government is now offering additional incentives to attract other big-budget productions. According to Variety,
The changes to the Kiwi incentives have opened up the country’s Large Budget Screen Production Grant (LBSPG) to allow for an additional grant for very large productions ($200 million-plus) as a direct result of the tussle over the “The Hobbit” films last year, when Warner Bros. sought financial incentives to make the big-budget production more attractive.
Now, an additional $NZ9.75 million ($7.75 million) is available to these big productions, and this new grant covers expenditure that may be excluded under the current LBSPG rules.
This move merely formalizes the negotiations thrashed out by the government last year, when it fought to keep the Hobbit pics in N.Z., and is the same deal that Warner Bros. negotiated at the time.
From stuff.co.nz: The latest phase of filming for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has kicked off with the arrival of several Kiwi stars to the King Country. But there were no international stars – Orlando Bloom, Cate Blanchett or Elijah Wood – to be seen. Crews have spent many weeks filming in Matamata and are expected to finish this week and it’s the small King Country town of Piopio that the multimillion-dollar movie will now focus on. Yesterday, more than a dozen Kiwi actors and extras flew in to Hamilton International Airport on their way to Te Kuiti.
They included former Shortland St actor Dean O’Gorman and comedian Mark Hadlow, who also starred in King Kong and Meet the Feebles. Hadlow, who is starring as a dwarf in The Hobbit, said the crew were looking forward to their time in the area. “It’s a great place to come. I come here an awful lot with my shows, too. They’re fabulous people.” Hadlow was looking forward to a round of golf yesterday before an unrelenting schedule of filming, which will continue in various locations around the country over the next seven weeks. The premiere of the first movie, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, will be in Wellington before its general release on December 14 next year.
I’ll be kicking off a new, temporary, regular column that I’m calling An Unexpected Journey because that’s exactly what it is.
A little over a month ago an email arrived asking of my interest in embedding myself on the set of The Hobbit for the entirety of their location shoot, spending over 2 months in New Zealand rolled in with the crew and writing up their adventures, hassles, triumphs and tribulations as they traveled all over the country shooting bits and pieces from the upcoming two-parter (sic) prequel to Lord of the Rings.“
There were all manner of animals on the set ranging from goats to roosters, pigs, oxen, horses and all of them had handlers there to make sure they were fed, watered and safely munching on the lush green grass of Matamata. They would quickly duck out of frame whenever shots would go up.
If you’ve watched the appendices on the Extended Editions of the Lord of the Rings films you should recognize Kiran [Shah]’s name. He’s a much loved character around the set. He’s an actor, stunt man and scale double. On Rings he doubled Elijah Wood. [In The Hobbit, Shah will be Martin Freeman’s double.]
[Kiran] Shah will also be a Goblin in the film.
So what do you all think? Share your thoughts and speculations on our message boards.
This week’s ‘Hobbit in 5’ gives us the details on the Hobbit shoot in New Zealand, the new video game ‘Lord of the Rings: War in the North’, and the recent Hobbit reunion as seen in Empire Magazine. Take a look!
