Sir Richard Taylor is a New Zealand film maker who has won Academy Awards for his special effects work on the Lord of the Rings films. He set up the props and special effects company Weta, whose work also includes effects on the Chronicles of Narnia.
Weta is a huge concern employing 148 people and housed in a huge 6300m studio space. In the interview with Richard Taylor that we were given to read, he describes how Weta created the armies of monsters in the Lord of the Rings films. He describes how they would "make dozens of statuettes of the Orcs and scanned the in 3D with 3D articulated skeletons and muscle mass and details added with graphics platforms".
To produce the effects where characters were of different size they used different techniques. For example in scenes featuring Frodo and Gandolf, sometimes Elijah Wood would kneel down and Ian McKellan would stand on a small crate. In scenes where different sized characters appeared in the same set they would film the scene twice with the cameras being operated by computer for consistent movement. The two recordings would be merged with the film of the larger characters set at a different frame size. For long shots, small models would be used, for example when Gandolf and Frodo are riding on the cart.
Miniature sets and models were used a lot in the making of The Lord of the Rings: over sixty sets were used and over 48,000 props were made.
The Weta Workshop has an incredible website at: http://www.wetanz.com/about-us/ which has pages telling all about the company, the design studio and work, the models and creatures, weapons, make up FX and props.
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