Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1489831
o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2 c g w 7 P rime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power debuted on Friday, September 1st, reaching more than 240 countries and territories worldwide. The eight-part series streamed new episodes each week, taking viewers into an epic world set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" books. It was an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory, and later fell to ruin. Beginning in a time of relative peace, The Rings of Power follows an ensemble cast of characters — represent- ing elves, trolls, dwarves, and humans — as they confront the long- feared reemergence of evil to Middle-earth. The series is led by showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and stars Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Rob- ert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Maxim Baldry, Nazanin Boniadi, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Charles Edwards, Trystan Gravelle, Sir Lenny Henry, Ema Horvath, Markella Kavenagh, Tyroe Muhafidin, Sophia Nomvete, Lloyd Owen, Megan Richards, Dylan Smith, Charlie Vickers, Leon Wadham, Benjamin Walker, Daniel Weyman, and Sara Zwangobani. PRODUCER RON AMES Ron Ames is one of the show's producers and sees The Rings of Pow- er as a new type of production that bridges both feature film and television formats. "It's this hybrid form," says Ames, whose credits include The Avia- tor, Avatar, and Real Steel. "It is theatrical production — streaming. I think we represent that. I think some of the other shows — The Man- dalorian, Game of Thrones — represent a new form of filmmaking, which is not TV and it's not a feature film. It has its own unique ca- dence, quality, and storytelling, because there are three acts created for each hour and then [they] flow into the other." Collectively, the series spanned 385 shoot days (214 main unit, 126 second unit, 45 splinters), representing 786 hours of footage and 24,659 takes. "That's a lot of material," says Ames, who equates it to four two-hour features. Production took place in New Zealand and visual effects tasks were distributed to a number of studios throughout the world, in- cluding ILM and Weta. Employing a cloud workflow was the only way to make the production and post possible. "It was a vision from the beginning," says Ames of the workflow. "We wanted to be cloud-based. I said, 'Can I have unlimited Ama- zon storage and connectivity?' And they said, 'Yes!' We had a full cloud-based production, so what that meant was, everything from camera originals were pushed to the cloud daily. We had servers, but the servers only were a place for stuff to go and then [get] pushed directly to the cloud." Metadata was also tracked from beginning to end. "We had ev- ery piece of metadata, from visual effects, script supervisor, on-set DIT, onto the camera systems, everything went into the headers of the footage and never le. So all along, through post production, we knew every piece of data and that could be shared with any of our vendors — both on the post side and on the visual effects side." The production made use of Ncam's Reality camera-tracking technology, which provides realtime previsualization of environ- ments, set extensions, and CGI elements directly in-camera while shooting. "While we were shooting, the director of photography and a cam- eraman could actually see those backgrounds, and the actors could see those backgrounds," he explains. "So while we didn't have an LED wall, we had Ncam playing back, in realtime, the backgrounds. That's what we used to do thousands of temps. When we were editing and the showrunners were looking at stuff, we were temping it as we went. We did thousands of temps using basically another form of virtual production, just not an LED wall." This way of working, with realtime previews and a global talent pool, all sharing media, is what Ames describes as "a dream come true" — and not one that's solely reserved for big-budget produc- tions. "If you were an independent film — and I have done small features with visual effects — you could use the same systems," he explains. "You do not have to be of a production of this size to benefit from The series spanned 385 shoot days, representing 786 hours of footage and 24,659 total takes.