Watching the appendices from the Special Edition Lord of the Rings DVD – The special effects guys have clearly spent the last several years thinking BIG. They casually talk about working up “miniatures” the size of baseball diamonds, or spending a month filming an entire scene inside a computer. So when you hear one of these guys mention that they considered making a miniature of the pillared hallway from Moria, but the number of pillars made it “prohibitive,” you realize that these guys have lost all sense of perspective. They don’t think small anymore. Whenever you hear “prohibitive,” think “FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE.”
You can almost imagine them saying “Oh, yeah, we thought about a life-size model of the Pyramids at Giza, but it would have been prohibitive.” Or, “We did some research into cloning a cave troll, but it was prohibitive.”
This movie is amazing.
not to mention that instead of making a miniature hobbiton, they went out and built hobbiton. then let it age for a year.
I was a little surprised to realize that the bag-end set was a set in a studio: I’d half figured they carved out the hillside and filmed inside the hill…
but then, it makes more sense for them to have built a gandalf sized set and a hobbit sized set, for the scale shots. what an insane production.
Yeah, I think that was the most rediculous part for me, was realizing that they didn’t just digitally scale the hobbits down all the time, they did all sorts of complicated camera trickery, which must have actually required a lot more work, but the results are so good, that they obviously made the right decision.
The camera trickery is easier/faster/cheaper than digitally scaling anything. Those techniques have been around since the beginning of film, and are well understood. To do it digitally, is vastly more expensive and time consuming. The general rule is that if it can be accomplished during regular shooting, it will cost much much less in post production.
–Alex