Lord of the Rings: Building Middle Earth ADAM VALDEZ, Weta Digital (NZ) 3 years ago, Adam Valdez joined many digital artists from around the world gathered in Wellington, New Zealand, to realize Peter Jackson's vision of J.R. R. Tolkien's classic book series "The Lord of the Rings." The project would prove to be an epic journey in itself. Weta Ltd., Peter Jackson's visual effects studio, would grow from 80 to 500 people in order to accomplish the necessary prosthetics, costumes, miniatures, creatures and visual effects for the films. An unprecedented number of departments were housed under the Weta name, and a large number of diverse and ambitious effects were to be produced. Numbers are frightening: twenty thousand extras, a hundred natural environments and three hundred and fifty different sets, around fifteen thousand costumes and fifty thousand objects -sword, shields, armors- made specially for the project and countless computer-generated effects. In order to accomplish this enormous enterprise, Peter Jackson and his team engaged on the longest shoot in modern film history (16 months), after two years of pre-production and followed by other two years of postproduction. From the beginning it was clear that such a huge project could only be possible thanks to the magic of digital technology. In
the midst of chaos, Adam and others built a studio, helped shoot
three films at once, and then created the stunning visual effects
for "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers,"
which opens worldwide on December the 18th. |
