Where the Hobbits Roam

 by Rita Hunt

The clouds could have come straight out of the Lord of the Rings but the scene below was somewhat more down to earth: cyclists and pedestrians bending in the wind on their way home from work as we were approaching the nerve centre of Wellywood on a stormy 13th of February. Weta here we come!

Photo by Miraz Jordan

There was a whiff of champagne and a lot of happy faces because the Oscar nominations had just been announced.

Jon Labrie, Chief Technical Officer of the heart of operations, had given us an interesting talk at our end of year meeting in 2001 about the technical colossus that is Weta, but since then the world has changed somewhat, because now all of us have seen THE film. So it was with some excitement that we stepped into the unassuming looking building with Jon there to meet us.

After signing the Official Secrets Act we were allowed into the Weta World of Wonder which looked surprisingly like a collection of Coca Cola machines, only these had film decks and cutting edge laser technology inside them.

All the filming still gets done the 'old fashioned way' on celluloid and divided up into 'shots', meaning the time slot when the camera keeps running and pointing at the same angle. When the angle changes that is the next shot. The film material gets edited first and then sent to Weta for digitising and addition of special effects. The digitising is done frame by frame.

The big Coca Cola machine in the corner scans several layers or elements of each film frame at 60,000 rpm mirror speed, and chomps through each frame in five seconds. The next place was reminiscent of a bank deposit room with air conditioning, where 800 x 1GHz processors silently do their bit and digitise material onto tapes in chunks of GigaBytes and even bigger TerraBytes, all manipulated by custom software.

A suspended punch bag in the next room seems to indicate that it can get quite stressful manipulating hobbits. Probably an anti-computer-smashing device ...

Macs are used to make a Quicktime movie of each frame so that it can be viewed at any time by the editor. Venturing further while glancing reverently at the recognisable Middle Earth costumes on the walls , we arrived at the Compositing Department where computer artists beaver away getting every single scene or layer detail just right.

Eventually the result of all this hard work can be seen on a Mac which has been made clever by Glen Anderson of Eudora fame and allows a complete digitised film scene to be viewed on the computer screen at a rate of 150Mb/s. Jon mentioned that it improves the quality of a film tremendously when one can watch scenes repeatedly and then make incremental improvements . The images from the computer screen will appear massively enlarged on the cinema screen and enlarge any oversights with it. The crew of 214 is now busy working on the second film which we are, of course, all eager to see. A trailer is expected to be ready in a few weeks time.

It was a great honour and pleasure to visit our very own Middle Earth manipulation centre and many thanks go to Jon Labrie for 'letting us in' and to Graeme Moffatt (and helpers?) for 'getting us in'.

Photo by Trevor Nixon