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 1 5 "The first designs we were trying, and some initial sketches, I re- member thinking to myself, 'This looks like a theme park map!' It's nothing that the artists were doing wrong. It's just that it's so hard to think about the actual scale...You have to keep reminding yourself: It's miles, not feet! It's blocks, not buildings." Smith has been involved in VFX-heavy projects that have incor- porated LED volumes and virtual production techniques, including assisting on the first season of The Mandalorian at ILM. Surprisingly, The Rings of Power went a different route. "Obviously, that's an amazing technology," he says of LED volumes. "While I was on that show, I really was able to get up to speed on how it was built and then see the volume and operation…so I [had] a very good idea of how it works, when it works and how it's used, coming into this project." When the team looked at the work they'd be shooting, it became clear that they wouldn't be able to amortize the cost of building an LED stage. "The fact that you have to source the panels, and build it, and get the crew and all that stuff...Nothing was off the table at the begin- ning, but we did realize, to make it worth it, there's a certain critical mass you have to reach. I do feel confident it was the right choice for the show, for the content that we had in Season 1, for sure. An LED wall can be an advantage, but it can also be a little bit of a dis- advantage in terms of developing all of those different assets in time for filming. A lot of these environments came together in the weeks aer." Marc Lous is the Editor-in-Chief of CGW's sister publication, Post. Many of the VFX crew members from Weta and other vendors also worked on The Fellowship of the Ring [2001]. The production utilized a fully cloud-based workflow.