Mad About Science: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

Disclaimer: This page contains behind-the-scenes information about the process of filming that could disrupt the immersive experience of watching these films. If that is a concern, please skip this page.

We are still talking about The Lord of the Rings trilogy more than two decades after the premier of The Fellowship of the Ring. This franchise succeeded in its mission to completely redefine cinema by upping the ante, creating an entire world of special effects that blended traditional techniques with computer-generated imagery that was cutting edge for its time.

Much of what made these films incredible has been adapted, recycled and improved upon in the past 20 years, but that hardly diminishes the herculean endeavor that was the creation of The Lord of the Rings. If anything, it should make one wonder how no one has quite tapped into the magic that brought this epic franchise to life since The Return of the King in 2003.

Credit is due at every level of The Lord of the Rings production, but the driving force behind the films’ staying power and popularity is undeniably the incredible work of Weta Workshop. While it’s easy to believe that the extent of the work in the film was done through computer imaging, an immense amount of production went into a mastery that is near and dear to my heart: miniatures.

Numerous shots of miniatures throughout the films included the epic city of Minas Tirith, the rain-slicked fortress of Helm’s Deep and the treacherous mines of Moira, where fools would fly from the towering Balrog. Virtually all of the aerial and wide shots of these epic locations were swing-by shots of colossal miniatures built by Weta Workshop, with CGI imposed over the footage to bring them to life. 

The composite technique of inserting one shot over another was nothing new to cinema. This was famously used when filming Metropolis, a German expressionist film released in 1927, to create vivid effects, movement and electrical surges during the transformation of the character Maria into the artificial body of the Maschinemensch. However, the level of detail and repeated use of this technique at different angles with minimal distortion in The Lord of the Rings was a legendary and expensive feat. 

The level of skill and care is especially evident in moving shots, such as the Fellowship fleeing across the Bridge of Khazad-dûm while the camera zooms out, or the tracking shot sweeping along Minas Tirith as the forces of Mordor besiege the city.

Using the term “miniature” isn’t exactly adequate for some of the scale sets built for the films. The set designers lovingly referred to these creations as big-atures, and with good reason. The big-ature of the tower and ring of Isengard was well over 10 feet tall and more than 65 feet wide. By comparison, traditional wargaming miniature terrain becomes lethal for your soldiers after six inches.

Big-ature sets weren’t the only ones created for the films. Full-sized sets were built to match the minis exactly, with such an attention to detail that the lighting between more than three composite shots was compared and replicated to maintain perfect cohesion and immersion. The difficulty of this must have been compounded by the use of forced perspective to maintain the illusion of dwarves, elves, hobbits and men all sharing a screen while appearing at vastly different sizes.

Forced perspective is most strikingly used during one of the early scenes of The Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf enters the hobbits’ home of Bag End to enjoy a cup of tea with an old friend. The way that forced perspective works is that you place something you wish to appear larger closer to the camera, while tricking the viewer’s eye into thinking these two objects are side by side. In this case, Ian McKellen, playing Gandalf, sat nearer to the camera with scaled-down props while Elijah Wood, playing Frodo, sat at a larger table farther back.

The real trick behind utilizing forced perspective is to make a shot dynamic without breaking the illusion. How do you track an actor or swivel the camera without breaking immersion? The production team hooked McKellen’s portion of the set to an electronic dolly that moved in tandem with the camera. During a panning shot, he and half the table moved with the camera, and from that perspective it appeared as though nothing had changed.

Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of the trilogy was the cast’s attention to detail when it came to combat. Many fantasy movies fall into the trap of employing flashy stage combat with flips, twirling flourishes and other acrobatic feats that make no sense in the context of martial combat; the cast of these films adhered closely to medieval military manuals, which can be seen in a number of scenes. 

The sweeping actions Viggo Mortensen’s character Aragorn used on Weathertop to ward off the Nazgûl, while seeming aimless and chaotic at first glance, was a very common crowd control technique used by knights on a crowded battlefield. The sweeping actions are intentionally wide and erratic to keep swarming aggressors at bay and off balance, in hopes of forcing an opening in a line or lapse in judgment that can be exploited. Another technique was Sean Bean, as Boromir,  grabbing the haft of a swinging ax, which was another common tactic used on the battlefield that could stop viking axes or French halberds from delivering a coup de grace.

Orlando Bloom, as Legolas, surfing down the stairs of Helm’s Deep on a shield was certainly not pulled from any medieval war manual, however, so I have no explanation for that one.

Stay curious, 7B.