Into the breach

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Ask Peter Jackson about his favourite bit of The Fellowship of The Ring and he hesitates for just a second.

"The sequence in the Mines of Moria."

It is there in the darkness, where the Fellowship take on goblins, orcs, a cave troll and the mysterious Balrog, where the first film pulls out all stops in its combination of grand set design, live action and computer-created creatures.

"The reality of The Fellowship of the Ring is there is not a lot of clearly defined action sequences," says Jackson. "Most of the big battles of The Lord of the Rings are in the second and third films. But there is a certain degree of action in the mines and we wanted to really make that quite exciting."

Jackson says the sequence demanded the use of "pre-viz" - pre-visualisation with computers.

"It's a step beyond storyboarding, where rather than just draw the pictures of the potential camera angles we actually made a little movie in the computer where we had little stick figures and we built a version of the set.

"We were able to move cameras around. We were able to do 3D camera movements and have our little stick figures moving around and replicate how the actors would run down stairs and things."

Jackson and his cohorts at Weta Digital got help from George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, and flew to Skywalker Ranch in California for advice and tips on software.

But the sequence also owes a debt to the low-tech influence of special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, best known for his stop-motion work on Jason and the Argonauts and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad.

"After many, many years of being a huge Ray Harryhausen fan, I regard the cave troll fight as my Harryhausen scene, where people fight a big monster.

"But I was always frustrated by the Harryhausen films in stop-motion animation, because whenever you see Jason and the Argonauts or the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, the animation scenes are locked off with static cameras.

"So I went the opposite way and used entirely hand-held cameras for the cave troll fight, where I had the cameramen just going crazy with the cameras, like filming a doco."

The sequence also features the only time in the movie where there are completely digital shots: "It happens on several shots where not one element in the shot is for real. It's all in a computer.

"We have people running who are computer people being chased by goblins who are computer goblins. They are being chased through a giant cavernous hallway and the hallway is in the computer."

And then there's the Balrog, which was one of the most difficult feats of design, mainly because no one knows what he looks like.

"The Balrog is described very enigmatically by Tolkien as a creature of shadow and flame. He really doesn't get into much more description than that.

"While it's wonderfully evocative in the books, simply because he is so mysterious - your imagination conjures up all sorts of things - we have to go beyond imagination and make these things real. So the Balrog was difficult but I am really pleased with the way he looks."

Next >>

Feature: Lord of the Rings