My Love of Lord of the Rings

First, let me say that this post is about the movies, not the books. I have read through the books once, a long time ago. I attempted to get through them again, and only made it through Fellowship and half of Two Towers. I got really bored with the Frodo/Sam/Gollom story and I gave up. Not surprisingly, those parts bore me in the movies as well. Anyway, onto the movies.

I’m always fascinated with the special features section on DVDs. I love learning about the “behind the scenes” stuff involved with making movies. Lord of the Rings (LotR) offers hours and hours of special features on the extended editions of each of the movies. Watching those has made me appreciate LotR more than I think I would have. The story itself is an epic tale filled with danger, romance, suspense, action, heroism, and bravery. In it’s most basic form, the plot is about a little Hobbit whose missions is to destroy the ring of power and thereby destroying their enemy, Sauron. Three movies later, this mission is accomplished, but what is involved in bringing that mission to the screen is fascinating to me.

Weta Workshop was the driving force to bringing these books to life on the big screen. Richard Taylor, the head of Weta Workshop, gave a directive to his team before they began production. Basically he told them to imagine that Middle Earth was a real place. It actually existed thousands of years ago and they have privilege of shooting on location and using artifacts found at the sites. Because of this little speech, the detail involved in each sculpture, piece of armor, landscape, and culture is immense! For example, each culture in Middle Earth is very distinct and you can pull out certain characteristics. The elves have clean, flowing lines in their armor and dress. The dwarves don’t have any curved lines, everything is square. The Rohan culture is all about horses. They have horse motif in everything from chairs to swords.

The thing that amazes me is how much detail they put into everything, even when they didn’t need to. One of the guys says something to the effect of “you don’t notice that it’s there, but you would notice if it wasn’t.” Like I said earlier, knowing all of this has made me appreciate these movies even more. Knowing the amount of work that was put into them moves me in some way. I bet you didn't know that principle photography took 14 months, but from start to finish, these movies took over 6 years to make. They put so much time and effort into the design process because they wanted to make Middle Earth believable to those who watched these movies.

I really could go on and on about these movies and all the work that went into creating them. Let's face it, there's about 30 hours of behind the scenes clips to watch. All in all, these films are great and are definitely worth watching!