Massive Undertaking
In creating such huge battle sequences as the attack on Helm’s Deep, Peter Jackson coached a half-time stadium crowd to help in achieving the sounds for the armies of darkness, while Weta’s proprietary behavioral software, dubbed Massive, pioneered the digital side of things. The Massive technology was also employed in creating scenes with oliphaunts and mumakils — the gargantuan, elephantine creatures on whose backs the invading hordes were ferried to war.

Sauron's armies of darkness ride to battle on the towering backs of oliphaunts.

With towers on the backs of the oliphaunts, Saindon says, “All the soldiers are positioned there using Massive. We tell it how many guys we want on top, and the rough positioning, and Massive fills it up. The technical director sets what motions the guys have to choose from. They’ll have particular motions that they have the option to do. Some guys might be shooting bows and arrows, some might just be walking around. We don’t have to decide what each character is going to do, but we can give them a library of motions, and when Massive runs, they go through it themselves and figure it out.”

The oliphaunts will be in a considerable number of shots for the final film, and so the Weta team will have to give the characters more of their attention. Saindon continues, “For [The Two Towers], we tried to do a Massive simulation of the guys on top, and found that the slightest little step from the oliphaunt would set the tower in motion in such a way that everyone would just instantly fall off. So, whereas before the oliphaunts weren’t in enough shots to make it that difficult yet, that’s something we need to work on for the third film quite a bit — to make such a huge creature walk in such a way that guys could actually ride on top of it, and not go flying.”

One imagines, when simulating scenes using Massive, several “takes” can be made until the kind of behavior results that works best for the shot. “For the large battle sequences,” Saindon says, “we would run simulations overnight, and come in the mornings to see what the characters had done. Sometimes, we would find they did something completely out of the ordinary, or that we wouldn’t expect at all. During the early sims, once the battle started, like 30-40% of the guys would all run away. They just didn’t want to fight. So, we had to make them much ‘braver,’ so they’d be willing to stay and fight.”

The third film entails enormous battle scenes, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers. It would be comical, perhaps, to keep some of the simulations as outtakes for the DVD release of the film. Saindon says, “I’m sure we will come up with some very interesting sims.”

Out of the Past, Into the Future
The ents, the ancient race of walking, talking trees, were among the other big characters in the film. Entirely keyframed, the ents brought an interesting “choppy” aesthetic to the otherwise fluid-looking 3D work.

Saindon says, “We created a full-size animatronic puppet of Treebeard’s upper torso that the actors sat on, and it was very stop-motionesque. Peter [Jackson] liked the way it moved, but it just didn’t feel real. The eyes didn’t have the depth that Peter wanted in them.”

Drawing inspiration from such stop-motion masters as Ray Harryhausen, animation director Randall Cook also liked the rigid movement of the animatronic puppet. He decided to keep the look and feel for the digital character, and Jackson completely agreed. Saindon says, “Even his skin and facial features, the way his bark slid on the surface, was very chunky.”