Tehanu has come up with the goods again. She found this site Film NZ News with a few bits about LOTR. (with a little side note from me: Anyone working on this film can E-Mail me anytime you know, just to chat) – Xoanon
LORD OF THE RINGS – PROPOSED SCHEDULE, New Zealand -in brief
“I can’t think of a better country to represent Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth on film,” says Jackson. “From the Shire to Rivendell, the Misty Mountains or Mordor – it’s all here at our doorstep.” .
Location: Wellington, Central Otago (South Island), Central Plateau (North Island).
Studio: Camperdown Studios, Wellington, New Zealand.
Pre Production: February 1999
Principal Photography: September 19th 1999. Filming for 8 weeks, followed by a 2 week break, this will go on for 18 months
Crew numbers
Standard Main Unit
2nd Unit
Action Unit
Small Unit shooting Miniatures
Small Unit shooting Scenics
Largest number of people will be employed in the Computer Effects, Model Making and Set bulding areas.
Effect on the shooting schedules of other projects – Basically Lord of the Rings will have the same affect as two feature films being shot at the same time. There will be crew and facilities available for other projects.
Xoanon Here,
How much would I love to buy my very own black stallion, learn to ride, saddle up, (oh, and move to New Zealand!) and get a job on this film! But alas, I’m a short Italian Canadian who is scared of horse pooh. (not really, but I’m scared of big pooh) This site is looking for genuine talent. Tehanu is already gearing up, heading to those single clubs looking for a horse rider to slide up to and make friends sorry
Auckland, New Zealand .
The Lord of the Rings
This feature film is to start filming in New Zealand later this year. This will require a massive amount of talent resource, for which ModelPool is procuring with a view to submitting to the Producers. It is expected that there will be around 16,000 film extras required all over New Zealand. There will also be a large number of horses and horse riders required to make this film.
Wondering how they are going to use CGI in the huge battle scenes? ‘Alain’ interviewed Peter Jackson himself not too long ago and learned the following:
….My magazine is a newszine called Science-Fiction Magazine. It’s 84 pages quadri with a printing of 65000 copies. It’s the one and prime (a.k.a. only) SF mag in France. We also tackle subjects such as Fantasy, Horror, and the Fantastique…
I’m not too sure regarding your whereabouts… But, if you’re familiar with the british SFX, well, we sort of look a bit like them.
Weta is Peter Jackson sfx company based in New Zealand. Massive is a software created by Weta geeks. As you surely know, there will be 15,000 extras (non talking parts) involved in the movie The LotR. Thanks to ‘Massive’, these extras will be digitalized and reproduced so as to have some 200,000 characters in the battle scenes. The + thing is that the battle will run randomly. That is: no one single character is programmed according to Peter’s will. The computer will rule them all and decide on its own who dies, who lives, what form of action it performs. And if Jackson goes for another shot, it will not reproduce the same pattern….
Massive is the software that Weta FX has designed to handle the battle CGI. Wow, being a former Computer Science major, that software appears to be very powerful! I wonder what kind of systems they use to run the battles?
View the exclusive pictures from this article in our gallery section.
TheOneRing’s first search for Hobbiton set out under trying conditions. It was raining like stink, and visibility was down to two carlengths if the car in front was fluorescent yellow or something, you sort of had to hope they knew where the road was. And this was State Highway 1 in the Central City we’re talking about. I had visions of being forced to send Xoanon pictures of a wall of rain with an X drawn on it marked, ‘We think Hobbiton is around here somewhere.’ How pathetic.
But the weather cleared, at least to dappled sun and clouds. It’s autumn still and the leaves are changing colour. I used to think that the landscape around Matamata, where we were headed, was just one of those boring green rural bits people have to drive through to get somewhere else. There’s a range of wild forested hills to the East, a flattish plain at their foot, and then further west the countryside becomes more rumpled with small hills and valleys of brilliant green grass. I’d forgotten the way farmers there make beautiful hedges that wander over the countryside in long intersecting lines, rising and falling with the lie of the land. It’s a feature of that area.
And I’d not been there in Autumn.
The native trees here are evergreen, so it’s only in areas where there’s been a great many European trees planted that you see those incredible colours at this time of year. Since, in The Fellowship of the Ring, the hobbits leave the Shire in Autumn, it’s going to be important to have that in the landscape where it’s filmed. Rumour has it that the Hobbiton set, once built, is going to be left to ‘age’ for a year. Which would put the filming there right in the middle of the leafturning season. Around Matamata that’s quite spectacular, because the landscape is full of oaks and poplars and other trees that look brilliant right now.
We wondered if we’d be able to identify the farm where the set was being built, but it was obvious enough. There were at least three ‘No Tresspass’ notices on the big gate, a very new-looking road, and beyond that, a few big pieces of earth-moving machinery.
Opposite the gate was a caravan pulled up into a bit of land by the road, and visitors were directed to report there. We did, and met Barry, whose job it is to keep a twenty-four hour watch on the gate.
“Looking for anything in particular?” he asked.
“Just another f***ing Aucklander, looking for the film set,” I said. (Hence the title to this piece.) But he was from the South Island, and hadn’t heard of JAFAS either.
Barry sat us down and talked to us. He seemed a bit bemused by the whole thing.
“Sixty-six people came out here last Sunday to look at this place. Some guy went in duckshooting, and a reporter with a camera went in with him pretending to be doing a story on the duckshooting, but he was trying to get photos of the set! And there’s nothing there, just the road they’re building to where the set’s going to be!”
I asked him if he’d read the book, and he said he hadn’t. He looked like he was used to working outdoors, and this security work was getting to him. Nothing to do all day except talk to strangers who turn up, and then only in order to tell them to go away.
“We’ve had everything out here – people flying over in helicopters…they’re trying to get the area declared a no-fly zone.”
I began to wonder if Mr. Alexander, whose farm this was, was getting unpopular with his neighbours. They hadn’t signed on for a year of being buzzed by light aircraft during lambing time; they couldn’t afford a security guard to keep sightseers from crossing their land…
“I can’t stop you from taking photos from the road. But don’t do anything you shouldn’t. Because then it’s me you’ll be getting in trouble, see?” said Barry. I thought he would make a good Sam Gamgee, except he looked big enough to break a fencepost with his bare hands. “Here’s the number of the publicity woman from the film company, I’ll just see if I can find it.” He leafed through pages and pages of contact numbers for people involved in the film, shaking his head a little over the sheer size of the undertaking. “See, she could ring you and tell you as soon as anything happens out here, and you’d be all square and above-board.”
I was driven crazy by the fact that, under the pages of phone numbers, I could glimpse a hand-drawn map of what they were building out there. Which of course I couldn’t get to see properly. I mean, what can I describe? There seemed to be a stream widening out to a pool, some lines that could be lanes…But you can find out that much from reading the books. Still, aaaaaaarggghhhh!
We drove off promising not to trespass. I hoped that nothing would happen in the coming year to destroy Barry’s Sam Gamgee-like faith in human nature. He believed that appealing to our sense of fair play would be enough. The farmer’s son arrived on a farm bike and gave us a foul look, so we left, and we didn’t climb any fences.
A little way along the road we came to a spot that had some view of what they are building: A road. Hmm. Very scenic bit of road, though, so we took photos of that, and of the landscape around the place generally. Subtract the fenceposts and telegraph poles, and you’ll have a good sense of what the Shire is going to look like.
It looks like there’s some native forest on a hill on the other side of the area where they’re building, and it seems likely that the set could be seen from there, so a later expedition could tackle that. It doesn’t seem to be private land. It’d mean a few km.
walking through trackless forest, and if you got caught by an irate film crew you’d have to pretend you were looking for, um, what is it that people are usually looking for in the bush? Dope? ‘Sorry, officer, I swear I wasn’t trying to get close to Peter Jackson’s film crew….I was just, y’know, looking after business…’
On to the Okoroire Tavern, which is doing a roaring trade since the army is staying there while they build Hobbiton. I wonder how much choice you get in the army – ‘Hey, do you want to go to Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission? Or would you like to go build Hobbiton?’
I asked the barmaid if the troops were enjoying a change from marching or whatever they do normally. She sort of sighed and said ‘no.’ Apparently it’s hard work. The hotel charges people $10 to use the thermal springs on their land, and they were totally booked up. (The bar, meanwhile, was empty.) We wandered over for a look, hoping to find some exhausted army people soaking away the pains of a hard day’s work, but the hot pools were inside corrugated iron huts, so we didn’t get to overhear any fascinating gossip there.
Back to the pub, which is old and gracious. Its grounds would make nice locations for some scenes. Huge old trees, greensward (actually a golf course) and a rather surprising bit of wild rapids hidden in a forested ravine below the thermal springs. Suddenly you drop out of this totally English landscape into a mossy, ferny dark slot in the land with a whole lot of white water churning around at the bottom of it.
The only people in the tavern who weren’t watching rugby were speaking Swedish, so we drew a bit of a blank there. Nobody had any obvious interest in The Lord Of The Rings, so we finished our beer and drove home past a really gaudy Paramount sunset.
Peter Jackson’s whereabouts of late could provide crew clues for The Lord Of The Rings. He returned to New Zealand last month after spending three weeks in Europe, where he is believed to have interviewed possible DP’s for his three-picture adaptation of the JRR Tolkien classic. Production is tipped to start on September 18. The only casting detail confirmed to date has been the recruitment of NZ armed forces as extras.
Well, today I’ve heard from 3 different sources that an offer has been made to ELIJAH WOOD to play Frodo in the three LORD OF THE RINGS movies that Peter Jackson will begin shooting at the end of the summer. Now, I know for a fact that Elijah read for the part, and before that I knew he was looking at the 3 scripts, and before that… Back when Elijah was working on THE FACULTY and we were talking geeky stuff, he expressed that his favorite book was THE LORD OF THE RINGS. So… Where is this? Between this and to story over at Cinescape it sounds like the casting process might be at that point where final decisions are being made. Cinescape is reporting that Timothy Spall (the photographer in “Secrets and Lies”, a film everybody should rush out and rent immediately) has been cast as Gimli in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings”! Warwick Davis apparently spilled the beans on this story at the Star Wars Celebration when he admitted that he had auditioned for the part and lost it to Spall. I think this is a brilliant casting move, and it gives me great confidence in Jackson. Spall has the stature and the voice for Gimli. He’ll be great. (He also played Rosencrantz in the Branagh version of “Hamlet”.) I have long been absent, but still I lurk. Wood: Frodo? Call me, Overstreet. So far, I think these are a pair of wonderful choices if this pans out. I’m looking into confirming these right now with folks on LORD OF THE RINGS. But these are the first serious casting choices we’ve received. What with all the Connery stuff and McGoohan, etc… Seems like exciting things are a coming up!