{"id":287,"date":"2003-04-11T12:24:00","date_gmt":"2003-04-11T12:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2003\/04\/my-my-my\/"},"modified":"2003-04-11T12:24:00","modified_gmt":"2003-04-11T12:24:00","slug":"my-my-my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2003\/04\/my-my-my\/","title":{"rendered":"My my my"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, the score’s now 3-3.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i> interpretation. Will read the trilogy again, and maybe go into the prehistory a bit. Haven’t read The Silmarillion<\/b> yet, so will do that too. <\/p>\n

I decided to start with the basics and read the Faq<\/a><\/b>. Went to a couple of interesting sites that had stuff on the movie – sadly, though, the official site<\/a><\/b> 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 The fan-sites were better, though a little outdated.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:<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

* Jonathan Rhys-Davies, who plays Gimli, provided the voice of Treebeard, the Ent.<\/p>\n

* 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. <\/p>\n

* 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!!!!!! <\/p>\n

* 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<\/i> 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.”<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}