The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a massive accomplishment of visual wizardry and imagination. Photo credit: Pierre Vinet/ New Line Prods. © 2002. 

An Instant Classic
The Return of the King caps the greatest gamble and greatest victory in modern filmmaking. Not since the original Star Wars trilogy has a film series generated so much enthusiasm. And never before has a fantasy film garnered so much praise, with Oscar nominations for Fellowship and Towers, and The Return of the King right on the threshold of a groundbreaking best picture victory as the odds-on favorite.

Jim Rygiel, visual effects supervisor on all three Lord of the Rings. Photo courtesy of New Line Prods.

Hence, Jim Rygiel, visual effects supervisor on all three Lord of the Rings films, has a right to feel proud. When asked which of the trilogy is his favorite, he pauses long before answering, as if to savor the more than five years’ work he put into perfecting the visual effects of the films. “I have to say Return of the King, because we knew where everything was going. We were so piled up with shots we could barely see, and there’s something beautiful about coming out of that — a pleasure after the pain sort of thing. Just in terms of sheer number, Return of the King has more shots than one and two combined; it’s like 1,450. It was mind-boggling to figure out logistically how to do them all. It’s something you never think you could have done, and you did it — like climbing Mt. Everest.”

Technical Evolution
Rygiel emphasizes how each film grew in scope. “A lot of things sort of amortized over the show. The Massive software got better. Everything got supercharged.”

He identifies Gollum as an element of key importance in the success of the films, but his final evaluation of what made Gollum a popular character is not the average technician’s answer. “When you look at Gollum as just a creature, there were a couple of major components that made him the phenomenon that he is, and one of them was the technology that created the look and texture of his skin, and its flexibility. The other was his motion and how that was achieved. But the main things, which are not technical, is Andy Serkis and what he brought to the role, and also some great lines to deliver. If any one of those things were out of there, I don’t think it would have been as great as it turned out to be.”

Despite Rygiel’s modesty, his teams’ contribution to Gollum was of the utmost importance in terms of creating a successful character — perhaps the first true CG superstar, who, in Return of the King, got a new skin. “We did this really neat technique with our traditional prosthetic guy from Weta Workshop. We had him paint a rubber mask of Gollum, and then we scanned that painting, which we used as the basis for our texture map on Gollum.” Painted using classical techniques, the skin was detailed to reveal thin layers of transparency, conveying the feeling of veins lying deep within the skin.