In amongst all the excitement and celebration of the new Hobbit movie, tonight the very sad news has broken that Eileen Moran, an Executive Producer at Weta Digital, died in New Zealand on Monday this week. Moran worked extensively with Peter Jackson and the Weta team, including on The Lord of the Rings movies and The Hobbit movies. She missed the Hobbit premiere last week because she was in hospital. You can read more here. Everyone in the TORn community would like to extend deepest sympathies to her family, her loved ones, her friends and her colleagues.
Category: Crew News
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“It’s changed almost completely,” Letteri says. “On the outside, you want Gollum to look like the same character, but he’s completely different” underneath.
The biggest change from the first set of films is the way that actor Andy Serkis’ performance is captured and analyzed in order to create the digital character, according to visual-effects supervisor Eric Saindon. “Our facial capture has progressed leaps and bounds,” he says. “Now we actually capture all of Andy’s performance, when he’s acting with Martin (Freeman) in Gollum’s cage on set. We have a small camera attached in front of his face that captures his exact facial performance. Rather than an animator going in and doing it frame-by-frame, the computer analyzes Andy’s performance and then fires Gollum’s muscles to do the exact same thing. So the first half of the animation, which is the raw mo-cap data, is really Andy.”
“We know so much more about how the face works,” Letteri adds. “When people communicate face to face there are so many things that are going on that you really have to study now and put into the characters. We hope that people recognize that there’s this extra layer of depth.”
“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” features at least 13 dwarves, a hobbit lead and a Shire-full of supporting hobbits, three wizards, an elven queen and many more characters, and that’s just the first film in the Peter Jackson trilogy; Britain-based designer Ann Maskrey was tasked with creating costumes for them all. Maskrey is new to Middle-earth, but her previous work includes designing costumes for the “Star Wars” prequels, “Clash of the Titans” and Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Hero Complex recently spoke with Maskrey about the challenges of dressing the dwarves and designing the look for a new wizard. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times here.
In this neat little video, 
Channel 7 Australia’s James Tobin chats with master swordsmith Peter Lyon about the weapons he made for The Hobbit. Some really interesting info about Orcrist, Thorin’s /other/ sword and Bolg’s massive be-spiked war-mace.
It’s not that long ago that Howard Shore’s OST for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was fully revealed for the first time as a listenable web-stream. Problem was, you couldn’t pick single tracks to listen to, and if you paused it, you had to start all over. Now, Rolling Stone offers the standard edition to listen to in its entirety with the ability to select tracks independently and the ability to pause as well.
Or if you want to trial the Special Edition, Watchtower Records has short previews from every track available on its website.
In the Rolling Stone article, Neil Finn says that “Song of the Lonely Mountain” builds on a musical theme written for the movie by New Zealand film composers Plan 9 and David Long, which a group of dwarves sing in an early scene. To work on the song, Finn put himself in the dwarves’ shoes.
“I’d get a little melody and I’d think, ‘Would a dwarf sing that?’ And you go, ‘No, it’s too floral. It’s not earthy enough,'” he says. “Even though there’s aspects of brotherhood and kinship in the song, I had a line about love and Peter and Fran [Walsh, co-writer and co-producer] sort of looked at me and said, ‘No, not love. There’s something not quite right about that.’ It’s not a love song.”