Suki, an old pal from the bygone Trivium-2k1 days, is in town. He’s in IIM-Indore now, and has come over for a summer-training here at Hyderabad. We met up yesterday, and straightaway went off for the evening show of The Two Towers. So, psasidhar, the score’s now 3-3.
Anyways, I found out to my chagrin that Suki was much much more well-versed in the nitpicking details of Middle Earth. In fact, yesterday’s viewing was a nice revelation – I haven’t been in touch with Tolkien for quite sometime – remember reading The Hobbit and The Trilogy once upon a time in the Third year, and that was it. Even after seeing the movie twice, I wasn’t “moved” enough to go and revisit Tolkien’s world. Maybe that’s because I have too much to read right now, and it somehow seemed too much of a bother to go back and do some serious research before seeing the movie….guess I am just lazy.
But with Suki yesterday, the experience took on a whole new meaning. The guy was close to explaining Elvish terms to me – It was startling to realise that I had to really think to figure out who the Nazgul were (“Ring-wraiths” is the term I generally use) ; or who Isildur was, or Elendil, or that Saruman uses the Palantir (those glowing stones) to communicate with Sauron. Hmmm.
So a new resolution for now. To try and get a little more involved with the world of Tolkien’s characters. After all, it’s the book and the story that matters, and not the film, which, as Jackson himself said, is just an interpretation, his interpretation. Will read the trilogy again, and maybe go into the prehistory a bit. Haven’t read The Silmarillion yet, so will do that too.
I decided to start with the basics and read the Faq. Went to a couple of interesting sites that had stuff on the movie – sadly, though, the official site is a mess. Too much hype and too less information. There’s a pretty nifty “module” which shows how the war scenes were contrived and executed. The fan-sites were better, though a little outdated. And at the end of it all, I discovered some interesting facts:
* Christopher Lee was a major fan-favourite for the role of Saruman AND Gandalf. Peter Jackson denied pretty early that Lee was being used in any of the roles. Another fan-favourite for the role of Gandalf was Sean Connery.
* Jonathan Rhys-Davies, who plays Gimli, provided the voice of Treebeard, the Ent.
* This one’s interesting. The “hero” Chain mail armour was manufactured in India. And this is what Jackson says about this – There is a company there (in India) that can make square-section mail very quickly and cheaply (Amnesty International have assured us they are not using child labour). ” Goes on to show how much regard people have for Indian labour laws.
* There was a software called MASSIVE that has been developed over 2000-01 expressly to achieve huge battle scenes for THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In Jackson’s words, “MASSIVE allows us to have 200,000 CG extras that we don’t animate, but they use a complex form of Artificial Intelligence to fight each other. You basically press a button, sit back and watch these huge battles unfold before your eyes. It’s amazing and a little frightening as it ushers in a new era in CG effects.” COOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!
* The original idea pitched was for two movies. Jackson prepared a 36-minute documentary as a “pitch” for the movie – why it should be made, and why he should be the guy to make it. Jackson: “Cool stuff included on the tape: An Uruk-Hai in full armour and prosthetics, and Orc make-up test, models of Helm’s Deep and Rivendell, marquettes of Elven armour and weapons, Gollum marquettes, a Cave Troll and a Balrog concept. CG tests included a CG Troll and a couple of huge Helm’s Deep battle shots using MASSIVE. Bob Shaye watched the tape in total silence and then declared that he wanted to make 3 movies. Bob deserves the credit for making a trilogy … it was his idea.”
Finding out behind-the-scenes stuff like this gives me a real high. That was kind of thing I used to do once upon a time, but that charm seems to be wearing off nowadays. Careful, beatzo!
I was just thinking how it would have been if Sean Connery played the role of Gandalf!!!
BTW, Careful, Beatzo! Careful!
Imagine this scene from TTT: the burst of white light at the forest, when Aragorn and Co attack the white Wizard, only to have their weapons laid useless by him.
Aragorn: Show yourself! Who are you?
(crescendo of strings in the background, slowly a bass sound rises – dong, dong, dong, dong, familiar monty norman theme)
Sean Connery as Gandalf: (suavely smoking pipeweed) The name’s Dalf. Gan dalf.
One can well imagine scenes of crucifiction and hysteria at this point of time. ;-)
MASSIVE sounds too good to be true! WWWWOOOOOHOOOOOWWW!
There was a whole section on the official website before the movie was released which showed exactly how the MASSIVE system worked. I cant see it now, but it maybe because I cant see flash animations on this computer.
Peter Jackson is either being humble, or simplifing things too much when he says “You press a button and they go fight”.
Each of the MASSIVE agents or creature has mind with a map of moves that it can make, and other parameters…Mapping these minds is a painful, long process, which was automated in part, so that no two MASSIVE agents will have the same mind and therefore, the same personality. The difference in physical appearence is acheived by starting with a few different basic faces, shields, armors and body types and then extrapolating these to arrive at the diversity, in an automated process.
this might shed some light. this is something that I saved to write a report for a course I am taking.
A-Life or Artificial Life is a very interesting field which deals with this and much more….
enjoy!!
excerpt from article begins…
To create the creatures that populate and, in many cases, stage massive battles in The Two Towers, WETA Workshop provided maquettes of each creature to be created digitally. The device that is used for scanning the maquettes in 3D was created in New Zealand and was initially used for measuring size and space of meat carcasses for the New Zealand butcher industry.
While the dimensions and proportions would be scanned for the digital artists to use for reference, “motion trees” were created on the motion capture stage to provide a library of movements, techniques, attacks, etc. for the characters to portray in battle. “Each of these characters has its own selection of military moves, its own repertoire of military performances to undertake, and all these elements have to be woven into the characters with great subtlety and the appearance of complete determination on the part of the digital character to closely complement the live action actor such that there is no opportunity to see the difference,” comments Taylor.
The revolutionary Massive software written by WETA Digital’s Stephen Regelous animated the groundbreaking Prologue from The Fellowship of the Ring and steps into the fore with The Two Towers. Regelous created the program in the spirit of the continuing push into artificial intelligence technology. “I wanted to create it using artificial life-inspired approaches rather than what would typically be done for a crowd system,” he explains. Massive works in creating “agents,” with their own randomized characteristics and the ability to make their own decisions in a crowd situation. “For these agents to respond naturally to their environment, it’s important that they have senses the same as we have. They have vision, sound, a sense of touch through collisions. They can see their environment.”
Each agent also has its own personality traits, i.e. boldness, aggressiveness, cowardliness, etc. “Then there are parameters that affect how dirty they are, how tall they are, how weary they are – so there are many ways that each of these agents can behave and be unique entities,” Regelous says.
“Each of these guys has an AI brain,” explains Massive technical director Geoff Tobin. “One part of the brain decides which action to do based on what he’s currently doing, what he’s allowed to do, and the other brain modules feed into that, giving him information about what kind of terrain he’s on, the enemies that are around him, the allies that are around him, navigation. In a way,” Tobin jokes, “they’re not so different from real extras.”
The final step following Massive’s simulation is the rendering of the image. Massive supervisor John Alitt created the Grunt to render CG images faster than any commercially available software. “Out of the Massive simulation engine we get motion data for each individual agent, which is just a description of joint angles that belong to the skeleton of the agent,” explains Alitt. “What Grunt does is take the motion data and file describing what the agent should look like, what possibilities of armor and clothing he has on, what possibilities of shading he’s got and actually construct that as it’s rendering from the motion data.”
Awesome stuff! Thanks.
Don’t know if http://www.lordoftherings.net/effects/index.html is the section on the official site that you were talking about.
I think it is http://www.lordoftherings.net/effects/launch.html.
I dont have flash, so when i access the page it automatically loads the non-flash (flat) version. I will check later, when I get to a windows machine, and let you know the site. I do remember that most of it was videos, which take some time to buffer. Will let you know.
and by the way, your userpic is very malayali and very very good :) Its one of my favourites, in fact. Is that, by any chance a self potrait? I shall add you as a friend.
if you have an interest in Kerala, join and we all can have fun!
ya i love the userpic too.. i have to thank for it. He drew it up from a pic i sent him.
good! so kerala has one more member :) as they say, the more the merrier!!
Thanks a lot for the info, da.
truly mindblowing.
I want LOTR dolls :(((
We wants it too! :-(