Magic in Middle-earth

Muse, Nov/Dec 2003 by Rickitt, Richard

Fifty years ago these strange words popped into the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford University. He didn't know where the words came from, but he wrote them down, and they became the first sentence in an amazing tale of terrible battles, fantastic beasts, Elves, Dwarves and, of course, Hobbits.

The Hobbit and three other Lord of the Rings books (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) have since sold more than 50 million copies, making them the most successful books ever-until Harry Potter!

Ever since they were published, people have wanted to make the books into a movie. But the otherworldly locations and unearthly creatures were too difficult to re-create on a movie set. It wasn't until sophisticated computer-based special-effects techniques were invented for films such as Jurassic Park and Toy Story that Lord of the Rings could be brought to the screen.

Film director Peter Jackson finally persuaded a Hollywood studio to let him make three Lord of the Rings films. To hold down costs, all three were filmed at the same time. The actors and over 2,000 other crew members spent 14 months filming in New Zealand (a movie normally takes about three months to film). After this epic shoot, the three films were edited in one go and all the special effects were added. This was where the real magic began.

Massive Battles

All three Lord of the Rings films include huge battle scenes with tens of thousands of fighting warriors. But where do you get 10,000 Orcs or 3,000 Elves?

"In the past, the only way to film enormous battles was to get hundreds of people to actually dress up in costumes and fight each other," explains Joe Letteri, who was in charge of the special effects for The Two Towers and The Return of the King. "This was actually done for some classic films like Waterloo, where the Russian army was employed to re-create historic battle scenes using thousands of soldiers. But for our movies the director wanted to see tens of thousands of warriors, many of them strange creatures such as the Orcs. We could never have filmed such huge battle scenes for real."

The solution was computer technology. "We developed a computer program called Massive," says Letteri. "This program combined the imagegenerating abilities of modern animation t software with a new form of artificial intelligence that allowed us to control how thousands of characters behaved."

How did it work? First, stunt performers strutted about like muscle-bound Uruk-hai or lithe Elves. As they moved, the positions of reflective markers on their black jumpsuits were recorded by many cameras simultaneously, a process called motion capture. In this way, the special-effects team built up a digital library of 250 body moves.

Next, a detailed 3-D model of each type of warrior was built in a computer. Each wore characteristic clothing and armor and carried a range of weapons.

Each warrior type was then given a "brain." The "brain" was a program that told the warrior whom to attack, which weapons to use, and how to stand, run, or fall on different types of surfaces. Warriors even knew how to die in a manner suited to the way they were attacked and where they were standing.

Once all the programs had been written, the computer automatically worked out the battle. Each warrior used its digital brain to decide what to do (an Uruk-hai might attack an Elf with a shield punch, for example). The computer then accessed the recorded body moves to position the warrior model correctly for that frame. This computation was repeated for each of the thousands of warriors in each frame of the battle.

The result: some of the most spectacular movie battles ever, with as many as 20,000 warriors fighting at once. "When we first tested the program, we couldn't believe how realistically the artificial intelligence made the warriors act," says Letteri. "They would do things in the battle that we never planned for-some of them worked so logically that when the fighting started they actually turned around and ran away!"

Giants and Dwarves

In Tolkien's books, some characters, such as Gandalf the Wizard, are the size of adult humans, whereas others, such as Hobbits, are the size of children. How could these size differences be re-created in a movie? Very tall and very short actors?

Again, the answer is movie magic. For some scenes with both big and little characters, the actors playing the big characters, such as Gandalf and Aragorn, were filmed first. Then the actors playing little characters, such as Merry and Pippin, were filmed with the camera placed farther away to make them look smaller. The little characters were added to shots of the bigger characters using a computer process called compositing.

Several other clever tricks were employed as well to make actors look different sizes. Early in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf visits Bilbo Baggins in his Hobbit hole. For this scene two Hobbit houses were built. They were absolutely identical, except one was bigger than the other: doors, windows, furniture, pots and pans-everything was made in two sizes. When Bilbo was filmed in the big set it made him look little, and when Gandalf was filmed in the little set it made him look big.