Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/110653
n n n n Environments•VFX want to regain their lonely mountain home, and not least, the mountain of gold inside. We meet the aging Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm), who describes how the dragon Smaug destroyed Erebor, causing the dwarves to abandon their home—and their gold. "There are classic visual effects shots in the sequence, with sets on greenscreen stages and wider environments that are all-digital," Aitken says. "It was an elaborate piece of work because of the environments. We have a transition every shot or two into a new part of Erebor. The mines. The forges. The hammer room. The jewelry workshop. The throne room." As for Smaug, even though the crew built, textured, and rendered a complete creature, Jackson teased the audiences with peekaboo views, as he had done with Gollum on the show, six or eight weeks," says Smith, who was the on-set visual effects supervisor for the second unit. "We had 195 shooting days." time of Avatar where we could dispense with miniatures entirely," Aitken says. "We could achieve all the complexity of a natural environment in CG." Thus, when they weren't on location, the director, actors, and crew filmed in huge sets built by Jackson's Weta Workshop and conceived with help from the two concept designers who had worked with Jackson on the Rings trilogy: John Howe and Alan Lee, who had illustrated the 1997 edition of "The Hobbit" and the 1991 edition of "The Lord of the Rings." Weta Digital artists matched and extended sets with computer graphics, and built entirely digital environments. "There were lots of sets, and some were huge," Saindon says. "And, we needed to have everything correct in stereo 3D. On Rings, if something was wrong, we could stick a tussock in front of it and no one would see it. Here, we didn't have that ability because of the 3D." In the past, the on-set crew would survey sets and place markers that layout artists and modelers could later use to place a virtual camera in 3D layouts and build set extensions. For this film, the crew scanned and photographed each set at night after everyone had left, to collect accurate dimensions and take photographs for textures and reference. "We had huge environmental builds with no hard lines," Saindon says. "There were no right angles in the Shire. There was a lot of detail in the Rivendell sets. And, thousands and thousands of pieces of artwork in the goblin caverns, all with organic shapes. So, we did a lot of scanning to capture all the angles. We put the scanned data into JPG files and created QuickTime VRs. We could spin the QuickTime VRs around the pivot point from where we created the scan. So, the camera guys could click on any pixel and get world-space coordinates. They could find the markers and get the information without having to open up the whole scan." Capturing Reality New Perspectives As he had done for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson took advantage of New Zealand's natural landscape by taking the actors and the crew into every corner of the country, as Saindon put it. "We traveled from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island in a huge convoy," he says. "When you lined up all the main-unit trucks in a row, we had a kilometer's worth of vehicles." Back at home, in a departure from how they shot the previous trilogy, the filmmakers decided not to use miniatures for The Hobbit. "Our technology got to the point around the Filming in stereo 3D created a second challenge for the crew: They couldn't use forced perspective, a traditional camera trick, to create the illusion that Gandalf and the elves were bigger than Bilbo and the dwarves, even though the actors were of similar sizes. "We tried, but it didn't work," Saindon says. Instead, they built two sets. To create the illusion, actors playing Bilbo and the dwarves performed their scenes on a detailed set that was 30 percent larger than normal. Ian McKellen and the actors playing the elves, on the other hand, worked on a nearby green- and convinces the dwarves' leader, the exiled king and warrior Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) that, as a burglar (which he is not), Bilbo would be a valuable addition. Bilbo could help open the secret door in the Lonely Mountain. Thus, Bilbo and the dwarves, with occasional and timely help from Gandalf, begin a journey that takes them through a series of encounters with Orcs, elves, trolls, wolves, stone giants, and other creatures in a variety of environments—open spaces, underground cities, mountains, forests, waterfalls, and a cave where Bilbo meets Gollum (Andy Serkis). Filming took place on set for a year and a half and on location for two and a half months. "On most films, you're on set for a couple weeks, or, if you're doing the whole The crew could not use forced perspective to create the illusion that Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is much smaller than Gandalf (Ian McKellen) because that trick didn't work with stereo 3D. Instead, they filmed the actors simultaneously on two stages and scaled the images so that while filming, Jackson could see one image composited from both cameras. first film of the Rings trilogy. "The prologue takes place a decade before, so in the second film, he'll be older," Aitken says. "We'll tweak the model, but most of the work will be at the texturing and shading level. We'll work some wrinkles into our displacement maps and make him more lived-in." After the prologue, we meet the youthful Bilbo (Martin Freeman), and the story of this hobbit's unexpected journey begins. Thirteen uninvited, rowdy dwarves show up one by one at the fussy but generally good-natured young hobbit's hobbit hole and throw a party. When the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) arrives, the dwarves' reason for disturbing Bilbo's quiet life becomes clear. Gandalf invited them. Gandalf persuades Bilbo to accompany the dwarves on a quest to rescue their home (and the gold), 8 January/February 2013 CGW0113-Hobbit1pfin.indd 8 1/31/13 5:02 PM