The New Hobbit Hole

This is a continuation of the infamous thread New Zealander Builds Hobbit Hole originally posted on January 26, 2001 by John Farson, who at the time undoubtedly thought he had found a rather obscure article that would elicit a few replies and die out. Without knowing it, he became the founder of the Hobbit Hole. For reasons incomprehensible to some, the thread grew to over 4100 replies. It became the place for hobbits and friends of hobbits to chit chat and share LoTR news and views, hang out, and talk amongst ourselves in the comfort of familiar surroundings.

In keeping with the new posting guidelines, the thread idea is continuing here, as will the Green Dragon Inn, our more structured spin-off thread, as soon as we figure out how to move all the good discussion that has been had there. As for the Hobbit Hole, we will just start fresh, bringing only a few mathoms such as the picture above with us to make it feel like home, and perhaps a walk down memory lane:

To fun but heartfelt debates about the integrity and worth of some of the characters…

So as you can see, everything JRR Tolkien (and Peter Jackson) is welcome here in our New Row, our soon-to-be familiar New Hobbit Hole…; philosophy, opinion, good talk and frequent silliness.

While you were snaiging, I was over carefully cutting and pasting that article you wanted to read!

At lunchtime I attended a seminar by Jon Labrie, former CTO of Weta Digital. He spoke about all kinds of interesting things and showed some great footage (no TTT new stuff though - except for one scene that will most definitely end up on the cutting room floor).
Here are some of the highlights.
FOTR had 590 SFX shots, of which 527 were done by Weta Digital. TTT has an official SFX shot count of 800, and they have no more time to do it (they had planned to have people working on TTT prior to the FOTR release, but it never happened). According to the original contract with New Line, all three films should be in the bag by now!

Of the Weta Digital staff about 40% are kiwis, and about 30% from the US. Many came for a short time and stayed, and many have applied for residency because they love the place. The challenge will be to find work for them once LOTR is completed.

PJ likes to leave decisions to the last possible moment, which aids the creative process but makes a bit of a logistics nightmare for planning SFX work. They “design for chaos”. They currently have 315 workstations and 1400 CPU processors of 2.2 gig or larger. This may well increase over the six and a half weeks they have left until the special effects for TTT have to be delivered (October 15).

Some of their solutions were very low tech – he showed a hilarious picture of two people in a horse suit for the Pass of Caradhras scenes.

For the balrog, Weta Digital spent two and a half years developing a complex fluid dynamics system to build realistic fire. It had, for example, a bounding box of oxygen, that as it was used up would produce smoke etc, producing very realistic simulated fire. Unfortunately, like real fire, it was extremely difficult to control. It was difficult to produce effects that PJ wanted, e.g. fire coming out of the balrog's fingers. Therefore with only 12 weeks remaining they dumped all their simulation work and simply filmed thousands of fire and smoke “sprites” and layered them into the scene. PJ looked at it and said that it was exactly what he had been looking for and he couldn’t understand why it had taken so long to achieve. A useful lesson in not being overly-clever.

The Balrog scenes were originally much longer, but were cut at the last minute in the edits to get the film length down. Jon saw an original cut of the film at four and a half hours and couldn’t see where anything could be cut out of it. He believes the true casualty of the length restrictions of film is “Middle Earth” itself – the legends and lore had to fall by the wayside to allow the necessary action to be covered. The special edition will go a long way to fixing this.

Gollum was “looking fantastic” when he saw him this morning. Gollum is in 200 shots and has to stand close-ups and line delivery. Treebeard has been a big challenge but is also looking really good.

Having a moving camera with forced perspective was a new technique they developed. For example, in the scene between Frodo and Gandalf at the table in Bag End, Frodo was 8 feet further back from the camera (there was a split in the table). The moving camera effect was achieved by having Frodo on a moving platform that was wired into the movements of the camera so that it automatically moved in a way that maintained the illusion. (Must have been a bit disconcerting for Elijah).

All the creatures were approved by PJ on the basis of 3D maquettes that were then scanned. They developed a hand-held scanning technology that was actually too successful in that the surfaces were so detailed and high-res that rendering them was impractical. They had to therefore develop a further technology to smooth them out again.

They developed skeletons, muscles and skins software, which meant that a lot of work that used to have to be manually rendered, e.g. muscles going from taut to floppy, became automatic.

There was a hilarious scene in the hall of Meduseld, where Aragorn sombrely warns Theoden, who is brooding in the foreground, “They will take you in a little room, my lord, and scan your very skull. They will make small toys of you, that children may play stupid games.” (Theoden cracked up at this point).

Viggo was cautious about his digital double and stipulated carefully what it could be used for and what not. This was wise, as bored animators can get one's digital double into all sorts of trouble…

The doubles were made by scanning actors in their full costume and makeup. Some were much harder than others, with no one really understanding why. It was impossible to make a convincing digital double of Elijah, for example. The doubles were mainly used for populating far-away miniature shots, e.g. running over the bridge of Khazad-dum, and walking up the stairs into Lothlorien.

For the cave troll scene they used an innovative form of motion capture where PJ actually walked around (with goggles on so he could see the scene) holding a marked object to represent the camera. Therefore the actual camera angles themselves were able to be “captured” which meant that the actors could see the whole scene blocked out before they were required to act it.

The Massive technology was discussed in some detail. Development of it originally began with King Kong in mind. Other crowd scene technology was based on particle physics and flocking, but Massive gives each individual a brain (of sorts). Some of them were very smart – we saw early trials where the more intelligent soldiers ran away from the battle. Individual soldiers who were acting stupidly could be deleted out of scenes very easily. They also showed the great increases in realism achieved by varying individual characteristics such as height, stride length and weapon-carrying style, as well as how they become dirtier and bloodier as battles went on. There were some very nice one-on-one battles showing different fighting techniques (and considerable blood-lust I have to say). Massive takes about a day and a half to simulate a battle of 50,000 units. The adding skins, environments etc is the bit that takes the time.

They showed some early Massive tests – first a test from five years ago with a very simple man figuring out a maze, and then a test from one year ago where a figure was able to recognise terrain and realise that he shouldn’t walk into a big crevasse, but rather around it. There was then a long and painful sequence of the consequences of him failing to avoid the hole, as he bounced, flopped and crunched his way down an interminable height before ending in a sad heap at the bottom.

Weta have developed their own custom rendering software for the Massive Creatures. It is called GRUNT – Guaranteed Rendering of Unlimited Numbers of Things! They also have built some “tree-dynamics” software (gosh, can’t understand why they couldn’t buy that off the shelf) called Grove.

The FOTR prologue was cut fairly early, and then restored with only eight weeks to go before the deadline by New Line, who felt that the story of the ring was being short-changed. It was therefore chaos trying to get it done in time. Jon wasn’t particularly happy with it in the end, and thought it looked “forced”. The peak number of figures on screen here was 70 to 80 thousand. For some Two Towers scenes there will be twice that. There is lots of Massive work in the Helm’s Deep scenes, which he confirmed will take up a large chunk of the next movie – “more than half an hour”.

They haven’t started ROTK effects yet as they can’t begin until PJ edits it together, and it’s all hands on deck for TTT at the moment. Between October 15 (when they deliver) and January should be fairly quiet, and the place will be “a ghost town” as everyone heads off on holidays to recover from this very stressful period. It is not unusual to work until 3 or 4 in the morning, or stay at work all the time and get fresh underwear delivered from home!

I asked which SFX scenes in the first movie he thought were the best, and which the worst. Jon mentioned the prologue as one of the weaker scenes, and also said that there were some “sloppy” scaling effects in the Council of Elrond scenes. But of the 500-odd shots they did, there are maybe 20 they’d like to have another go at, a ratio he’s pretty happy with. Some of his favourite scenes include Gwaihir, the Balrog (he was rueful that it had to be cut so much) and some of the digital matte work.

I asked about the DVD, in particular, the seeming fix-up of the car, and the scene where Nazgul suddenly appears on the left of the tree when it hadn’t approached on the right. He didn’t know about the car thing, but interestingly, he said that the Nazgul vs. tree was indeed originally a mistake. They had laughed and said “look, we forgot to rotoscope out the right hand side”. But when PJ saw it, he really liked it! He liked the idea of Nazgul just appearing unpredictably, and so it was left there. Jon was very surprised to hear that it was different in the DVD.

It was a wonderful session – thanks Jon!

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