Presenting The One Last Party at the Hollywood Post 43 of The American Legion. TORn staffers Ashlee Rose Scott and Greg Barrett were among TORn’s official photographers for The One Last Party at the Hollywood Post 43 of The American Legion. They took more than 2,500 photos of all the action on the night, but here’s a handful of teasers to tide you over while we sort out the very best.

Also very quickly, on behalf of TheOnering.net, I’d like to again thank all the Indiegogo supporters and sponsors who helped make the party possible. Whether you contributed $1 or $1,000, or even simply told folks about our campaign on social media, this party could not have happened without your belief and backing! We hope everyone who attended had a ball, and that those who weren’t able to make it had fun watching our live stream.

We do still have some Indiegogo perk fulfillment to complete, and for those waiting on perks, we’ll be in touch soon to let you know what’s happening there.

In the meantime, enjoy these great teaser stills from the party!
Continue reading “Check out 24 fabulous teaser images from The One Last Party”

HobbitBlackArrowa2Fans got their first glimpse of this prop during NYCC and now you can order this in-stock collectible to add to your collection.

Replicating The Black Arrow that Bard uses to kill Smaug in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is made from metal reinforced fibreglass with a urethane head and vinyl fletching and comes with two urethane hooks for horizontal display, in pride of place, on your wall.

This 1:1 collectibles is limited to just 1500 pieces worldwide and a great price of $199.00

LOTRFaramir2Yesterday our friends at Weta Workshop had a nice surprise for us. The second statue in the relaunched The Lord of the Rings statue line is now available for order.

As you may recall from Comic-Con last year, The Balrog -Demon of Shadow and Flame, as well as Faramir, were on display.

Faramir, a character so many of us have been waiting for, can now be yours to order for $249 at an edition size of only 1000 pieces worldwide.

If you hate waiting like me, then you’ll love that this is also in-stock and ready to ship now!

The likeness and detail on this statue are some of Weta’s best work. Having a chance to add Faramir to your collections will be one you won’t want to miss.

Peter Jackson Beorn Set The Dominion Post is reporting that there may finally be movement on the long-mooted Middle-earth film museum in Wellington.


Wellington’s long-heralded film museum finally looks set for a waterfront home.

The idea was first suggested in 2001, as Lord of the Rings fever established Wellington on the international movie-making map.

Talks between the city council and Rings kingpins Sir Peter Jackson and Sir Richard Taylor about a museum are understood to have been taking place for years, but crucial questions have always included where it would be sited. Continue reading “Wellington may finally get its Middle-earth film museum”

Joe Letteri Image WETA Digital director and senior visual fx supervisor Joe Letteri conducted an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit a little earlier. Letteri has, of course, worked on a slew of films such as Lord of the Rings, Avatar, The Hobbit, King Kong, and Planet of the Apes.

Here’s just a few of his answers. Click the link at the bottom to see the complete thread.

Q: How is Peter Jackson in person?

Peter’s great in person. He’s really collaborative, really open to ideas. And he’s got a LOT of energy. And I think one of the things that motivates Peter, which I think applies to everyone at Weta, is that you don’t give up on the film until you have put every ounce of effort you possibly can into it, to try to make it as best as possible before it goes out the door.

Q: What’s your favorite pre-cgi movie? Have there been any movies that you thought, “Wow, I wish we thought of that?”

There’s 2 that really stand out, pre-CGI – they would have to be 2001 and STAR WARS. Because 2001 was just visually stunning, with its portrayal of space and how you could use FX to take you INTO space, and STAR WARS just applied that with a whole idea of an action movie sequence that just really opened up a whole world of storytelling.

Q: How was your experience working on the hobbit:battle of the five armies movie?

The experience working on those films was great, because we got to really spend another 3 years in Middle Earth, which is a fantastically open environment for us. We had the ability to not only walk through this fantastic landscape of Middle Earth, but help to create large parts of it, and as the series went on, we got to create more and more interesting characters. So it was great in the first film, to be able to bring Gollum back again, because he’s a favorite character of mine. It was great to be able to create Smaug, because he’s such a fantastic character. And, in the end, we created about 130 different characters for those 3 films.

Q: You mentioned that gollum from lotr and hobbit is your favourite character; how did the idea come about to use an actor for the portrayal of gollum rather than use cgi? And what did you think of Andy Serkis as gollum? I thought he was amazing, really brought the character to life!

Well, Gollum is a CGI character. What happened is that Andy was brought in, to record Gollum’s voice. But Andy, being an actor himself, worked with Peter to come up with this idea of having him perform in front of the camera with the other actors.

And that brought a whole new level of drama to the performance, because that meant that the actors could work with Andy as if Gollum were really there with them.

And so we then recorded Andy’s performance, and used that as a guide for creating the Gollum character, on top of the performance he gave on the set.

Now, when we did RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, we made a technical breakthrough where we could use the performance capture at the same time that Andy was performing onset.

And so that really allowed us then to do Gollum the same way for Hobbit, which was fantastic because it really kept Andy’s performance in the moment. And then we were able to take that one step further with DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, because then we were able to take all the recording gear to a remote location. So it’s given us the ability to work with actors to create these characters anywhere in the world.

And obviously, a huge fan of Andy. He’s a fantastic actor, and we’ve been fortunate to work with him all these years.

[Read More]

ShadowofMordor_LordoftheHunt_StealthCaragorA bit like the Oscars for video games, “Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor,” won big at the 18th annual DICE Awards, emerging on top in eight categories. Another fantasy game, “Dragon Age: Inquisition,” won the Game of the Year honors but SoM had an outstanding night despite not taking that prize. It won:

Outstanding Achievement in Story
Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction
Outstanding Achievement in Game Design
Adventure Game of the Year
Outstanding Innovation in Gaming
Outstanding Achievement in Animation
Outstanding Achievement in Character
Outstanding Technical Achievement
Continue reading “‘Shadow of Mordor’ wins big at DICE awards, gets BAFTA nominations”