This movie benefited from the constant refining of technique that began with The Fellowship of the Ring.

BD: And you had the benefit of working on the effects over a three-year span.

PJ: Yeah, we learn as we go. The Gollum shots were the simpler shots in this film because we had obviously gone through such a pipeline on Two Towers. And the reality with a lot of the effects was to do one or to shots at the beginning. With the Shelob, we picked a couple of shots and we completed those shots, and then we worked out everything that made Shelob look real, the way that her texture should look, the contrast. At that point, you sign off on those, and we were then able to do the other 40-odd shots very quickly.

BD: What about improvements with Massive?

PJ: We made improvements on the models we used for Massive — we made them more realistic. You know, we had [digital] horses for The Two Towers, except for this movie we wanted them to hold up a lot closer to the camera and to look realistic, so we remodeled a few of our models that we used for Massive. And I’m not 100% sure what improvements were made within the Massive code. But I know that Massive’s real organic and it keeps being refined and worked on all the time.

BD: And the digital grading?

PJ: The digital grading is interesting because in some respects it should happen during the effects pipeline. In an ideal world there’d be a certain amount of grading that would occur before you comp the elements together. But what we generally did was, in order to get through the number of shots that we had, as we would comp we would just do a very neutral, basically lit and graded shot, and then that would go to a post house and then Peter Doyle would then do a digital grade on the final comp shot, which for the most part worked fine.

Jackson strived for a photoreal look in the vfx shots as in this scene where the Mumakil advance in the battle at Pelennor Fields.

BD: What are the lessons learned that would aid you with King Kong?

PJ: One of the big lessons that I learned on The Return of the King, and I sort of exploited it, is that during the course of making the films motion tracking is actually one of things that improved a lot. Having the camera department, the CG camera department, be able to track hand-held shots has become faster and more efficient, more accurate. And so I’ve discovered that there’s much less emphasis now on shooting the plates for vfx shots.

Jackson found that motion tracking improved greatly over the course of the three films, and will benefit him with the forthcoming King Kong.

You know, when we started out several years ago, we would try and use motion control as much as we could, but we very rarely use motion control now. The main use for motion control is when we’re doing a Gollum scene with Andy Serkis, and we want to move the camera around but have a clean background plate to paint Andy out before putting Gollum in, and do a motion control pass bit in the same try with a moving camera. We did the motion capture on-set, which I don’t think has ever been done before, because we were using motion capture to get a lot of Gollum’s basic body movements. The usual approach we used in The Two Towers was that we’d shoot the scene with Andy on-set with Elijah [Wood] and Sean [Astin] and then much later — sometimes a year or more — we’d have Andy on a motion capture stage and he’d have to duplicate his performances that he did before. But what we did on this film was set our motion capture cameras up on the actual set where we were shooting because we did some pick-ups this year. We shot two or three of Gollum. And we’d set up our motion capture cameras on the stage with Elijah and Sean, and we had Andy in the motion capture suit with the reflective spots and we did everything at the same time. So when I came to cut the film on the Avid, we didn’t have to go back and do any mocap during post-production.

Bill Desowitz is the editor of VFXWorld.