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.
Category: Old Main News
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]
Andy Serkis has swapped the technical difficulties of playing characters such as Gollum in Lord of the Rings, and the giant ape in King Kong, for a role as Hoodwink, a tough local kingpin on a rundown London council estate in Sugarhouse. “He’s a very visceral character and he’s a very physical character. I suppose the fact of the matter is I’m surprised that more people aren’t like Hoodwink,” says Serkis. “I think most people live on the edge. How many times have you got into a car and someone’s beeping their horn behind you – there’s only that much between them getting out of their car and doing serious damage? The thing is [Hoodwink] doesn’t have a limiter.” [More]
He makes occasional appearances on the television series All Saints. He is internationally best known for his performance as Denethor in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King film. His latest films are White Noise: The Light and One Night with the King. He stands 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) in height.
He played Russian Consul Anatoly Markov in the sixth season of 24. He was also the Artistic Director of Stage Company of South Australia from 1977 to 1987 and Head of Drama, Brent St. School of Arts (Sydney) 1997-2000.
He has illustrated several fantasy books such as the centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings, The Children of Húrin, Faeries (with Brian Froud), Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock (as well as the cover of an early print of this book), The Mabinogion, Castles and Merlin Dreams. He won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration in 1993 for Black Ships Before Troy and the Best Artist Award at the World Fantasy Awards of 1998.
Lee and John Howe were the lead concept artists of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies. He illustrated many of the scenarios for the movies, including objects and weapons for the actors. In 2004, he won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his work on the third film in the trilogy, The Return of the King. Lee has also worked as a conceptual designer on the films Legend, Erik the Viking, King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the television mini-series Merlin. Lee recently released a portfolio of his conceptual artwork for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, entitled The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook.