This is NOT a still from the movie promo sites. I took it. Really.
We’ve admitted to being a pretty nerdly lot on Evenstar before, we’ve even named boats (including this one) out of Tolkien. Star Trek, Doctor Who, Tolkien and fantasy and SciFi of all sorts are staples of family entertainment on Evenstar. So coming to New Zealand where the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed, well you just can’t pass up those sights!
Peter Jackson filmed the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (which we care about a lot less for many geeky reasons which can mostly be summed up as “more is sometimes less…”) all over New Zealand. All of the stunning vistas and gorgeous views of Middle Earth as well as some of the most bleak and blasted landscapes of Mordor are taken directly from New Zealand – or at least start with New Zealand as the canvas to which the movie mages apply their CGI.
To wit, a tourism industry has sprung up here to support all the fans of the books and movies interested in dressing as orcs, hobbits and elves and going sightseeing. One can actually book a packaged three-week tour where you fly to New Zealand and tour the country and movie sites by bus, car, plane, foot, helicopter, raft and boat to see dozens of movie sites, studios, sets, and relics spread out over both North and South island.
We, of course, are way too cheap to do THAT.
But what we did do was take the family truckster for a few days while the boat is on the hard and take a spin South to see some of the sights and get our geek on for a bit.
By the way I’m going to assume here in this post that you have some familiarity with The Lord of the Rings (or LOTR hereafter), The Hobbit, and Tolkien’s work and some of the characters and places in them. I’m not going to re-explain them here but I will try to find links and video clips to put what we are seeing in context. Often the Extended Edition of the movies from the DVD’s shows a bit more.
Hobbiton
Both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have opening sequences in the idyllic, pastoral Shire and the town of Hobbiton. In both movies it sets the stage for the mild-mannered existence of the hobbits before they are dragged from their pipes and second breakfasts into the chaos of the rest of Middle Earth and in the LOTR provides the touchstone for the hobbits for why they are doing what they are doing.
Hobbiton is in the middle of a sheep farm in New Zealand, about two hours driving Southwest of Auckland. Apparently the farmer had never heard of the LOTR when Mr. Jackson sat down in his kitchen to negotiate terms for using his land…but his wife had. There are about 13,000 sheep that share the Hobbiton set, but now that farmer is retired and his sons share the roles of running the movie set and tending the sheep.
F
or the LOTR the set used a lot of temporary structures; foam blocks and canvases and things that disappeared after the filming. The movie aired in New Zealand and a lot of the locals recognized the mountain ranges that appear for a few seconds and realized the films were set nearby. The first “set tour” may have been conceived in a pub and consisted of a few mates in a pickup coming to look at the essentially empty fields of Hobbiton. Needless to say, word got out…
When the folks from New Line returned to talk to the owner of the farm about The Hobbit, the farmer very shrewdly got them to agree to make the sets permanent. He recognized that there was definitely a tourism business developing (could it be all the costumed people scaring his sheep flocks?) and saw he could make a nice permanent attraction. So the film crew agreed and the second time around Hobbiton was recreated with permanent facades an structures instead of foam blocks.
The owners of the property have done a wonderful job maintaining the location, with beautiful gardens and grounds. In addition the set from the Green Dragon pub that is featured at the end of the Return of the King, and more extensively in the extended DVD release, was moved and reconstructed on site. The hobbit holes are generally false fronts, though one of them you can step into and for Bag End the created the initial entrance foyer for a depth of about 30 feet.
For reasons which are pretty clear from the number of people that come to the Hobbiton Movie Set you can’t just walk around. From the staging area off the “main” (and I use this term lightly) road you must take a bus through the 13,000 sheep to get to the little dale, hill and pond where the movies where filmed. The tour takes about ninety minutes and ends at the Green Dragon for a complimentary beer, hard cider or ginger beer. On the whole we could have spent more time there just breathing in the ambiance, it is a charming place. But I suspect if they let people wander loose in no time you’d have folks trying to dig up Bag End for Bilbo’s gold or just wander off and lose themselves.
What is impressive is some of the effort you learn that the movie makers made for authenticity. That is what makes someone like Peter Jackson a good director to recreate a fantasy world, he pays attention to detail that none of consciously notice but might jar something in the back of our heads.
For example there is a tree growing on top of Bilbo’s hole at Bag End.
It can be seen from the distance and up close in these two pictures. When filming the LOTR the crew found a tree they liked elsewhere, dug it up, and replanted it on top of the hill. Of course in the long run the tree didn’t like this much and didn’t survive the transplant.
Fast forward a few years to filming The Hobbit, which is actually set some fifty years before the LOTR. So what the special effects people had to do was re-create the exact tree that was on Bag End in the LOTR, except fifty years younger. Which they did, with metal, fabric, fake leaves and other various prop substances – they built an entire fake tree to avoid the discontinuity of having a wrong shaped tree sitting on Bilbo’s house. The leaves look a little too green in real life, but it worked for the movies.
No Hobbits were harmed in the taking of this picture, though these holes never appeared in the movies.
Peter Jackson’s crew actually went so far as to build a whole patch of hobbit holes that never actually made it on screen. The idea apparently was that if any distance shots were needed, or shots with other holes in the background they could have this little patch of holes available so as not to reuse the other holes inappropriately. But they were never needed and never used.
Some of the other fascinating things that we learned involved how the movies were created, some of the tricks employed by the crews to deal with the scale issues of having six foot tall actors on screen next to nearly six-foot tall actors that were playing three foot tall hobbits. A lot of CGI was obviously used in these movies, but there were a lot of age old techniques like “forced perspective” and other camera tricks that achieved the same effect.
This hole is only four feet tall, we are actually hobbits. Though I hate shaving my feet to look normal.
The hobbit holes in Hobbiton are made in all different sizes, in order that actors of different sizes could be shot next to them to make them appear smaller or larger depending on the need. So you stick Ian McKellen (Gandalf) next to a four foot hobbit hole and he looks huge; stick Elijiah Wood (Frod0) next to a seven foot tall hole and he looks…like a hobbit!
For scenes like Gandalf’s entrance into the Shire with Frodo the scenes were often constructed so that Elijah Wood was positioned ten feet or more behind Ian McKellan, but a straight camera shot he just looked…smaller. These Hollywood types are a lot more clever than we expected at tricking our eyes!
Apparently accident also plays a role. In the scene where Galdalf enters Bilbo’s hole for the first time and hits his head on the ceiling – that was not scripted slapstick. Ian McKellen, in a tiny hobbit hole set, really hit his head and started bumping into things – but he is such a good actor that he stayed in character and they could turn the accident into a real take that helped show the awkwardness of “big people” around hobbits.
The tour ends, as mentioned at the Green Dragon for a spot of beer. Looking over the pond from Hobbiton you can see Bywater looking pretty much as it does in the movies.
One fact that amazed me the most from the tour guide Jess – she has given tours where as many as 1/3 of her tour group has never seen the movies or read any of the books. How do you do this? Why would you do this? The tour isn’t cheap – seventy five New Zealand dollars for an adult (around $60 US) – and it isn’t exactly in a convenient spot to get to either. My only guess is that someone booked a “New Zealand Holiday” package and along with the must-see sites like the glow-worm caves, geysers and Maori cultural shows is “Hobbiton.” It must be utterly baffling though, to be a tourist who can’t understand the English speaking guide for a tour for a movie site with fantastic things you’ve never heard of.
We’ll continue on in the next post to visit Weathertop, the Emyn Muil, Ithilien, and Mordor!
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