Gollum has become the defining vfx achievement of the trilogy. Photo credit: Pierre Vinet/ New Line Prods. © 2002.

To create Gollum’s motion on the first two films, Rygiel used rotomation, with keyframe animators mimicking Andy Serkis’ movements. Also used was a motion capturing stage, in which data was collected during motion-capture rehearsals, after which, the live actors performed to an imaginary Gollum on the real take. And there was much traditional key frame animation. “But this year we took an experimental leap — I wish we had done it a lot sooner, but it was just as technology was getting to this point. We actually put sensors on Andy Serkis, as he was acting, and we were motion capturing as Peter was shooting the scene.” Despite the complexity of setting up equipment and lights, “It ended up working perfectly. There’s a scene, for instance, where Gollum is rolling down a hill with Sean Astin, and to do that would have meant probably keyframing, because you couldn’t motion-capture just Andy rolling down by himself and get him integrated with Sean — you’d have to do this almost articulated key-rotomation sort of thing. But with this new motion-capture we caught the motion instantly as Andy did his take. We dressed him in sort of a tan suit to mimic Gollum’s skin, with tracking markers on it — those digital ping-pong balls. When he rolled down, the markers would be tracked in realtime. The first thing we would have to do in post is paint Andy out of the plate — we’d stick Gollum in there and we’d see where Andy would overlap with Gollum, and we’d hand paint that all out. Very time consuming in post, but we had Andy’s animation in there right away. You’re going to see more and more of this technique, it’s a pretty important breakthrough.”

Story First, Effects Second
Rygiel emphasizes that the trilogy was not created as a showcase for effects, but that effects were always in service to the tale. “That’s the plan! Exactly — to laden it with effects, but not for one second do we want you to be conscious that there are effects in the film.”

The trilogy is a modern classic — and in many ways represents the greatest triumph of visual effects. Because of CGI, one gets the feeling that for the first time in movie history a fantastic story was told that made no compromise in its visual conception. Never do we think that Peter Jackson wanted something grander or more complex, yet had to suffice with less, due to technical infeasibility. Everything is how it should be; never does a setting or character fail to measure up to the highest imaginative standard. Indeed, the films are unthinkable without CGI. Yet, as the greatest compliment to the filmmakers, there was never a moment when the effects overwhelmed the power of the story. We do not come away from the trilogy amazed by how realistic the setting of Helm’s Deep was, or the animated motion of the mumakils — no, what resonates is the emotion of Sam’s loyalty to Frodo, the fearlessness of Aragorn, the wisdom of Gandalf, the tragic duplicity of Gollum.

Some of the techniques remained the same throughout the course of the productions. To present the hobbits’ size differences, “a lot of it was just camera tricks from the ‘20s, with forced perspective and simple things such as standing Ian McKellen on an apple box. In some cases, we shot the hobbits separately against a bluescreen and tracked them in and shrunk them down later, and we made digital creations of the hobbits for use in distance shots. But we couldn’t get too close to the digital guys because — well, they’re digital.”