The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy Exhibition

[Barliman Butterbur]

The ultimate Tolkien fantasy
By AMY COOPES in Sydney
23dec04

REPLICAS, rubber ears and the sacred ring itself – for Tolkien fans this exhibition is a fantasy come true.

Boasting more than 650 exhibits, including a 5m replica of a cave troll, Galadriel's gossamer gown and three of the rings of power, the Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy Exhibition is a sight to behold.

Fans can go behind the scenes of the trilogy's special effects, come face-to-face with life-size models of gruesome creatures and hear the cast's insights into the movie-making process.

Museum director Kevin Fewster says the exhibition – which will open for a three-month stay at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum on Boxing Day – is more than a film tribute.

"The Lord of the Rings is a truly international phenomenon, it has become part of popular culture," Mr Fewster said yesterday at the launch.


The exhibition – which has already attracted 800,000 visitors around the world but will not tour any other Australian states – originated as a project of Te Papa Tongarewa (the Museum of New Zealand) almost six years ago. "The Lord of the Rings has universally compelling themes and touches the human psyche in deep and mysterious ways," said Te Papa director Paul Brewer.

Mr Fewster said there was something to satisfy even the most puritanical Rings fan, with 85 artworks and graphics including works by famed Rings artists Alan Lee and John Howe.

The sheer technical accomplishment and scale of the items is enough to impress even the toughest non-convert.

Visitors can sit on a shrinking set and appear instantly hobbit-sized, witness the hybrid human/digital technology which created Gollum and simulated the trilogy's majestic battle scenes, and even revel in trivia. For instance, Weta Workshops ran three large foam latex ovens 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 3 1/2 years to create enough prosthetic ears and feet.

About 610m of prosthetics was needed just for the four main hobbits. Forty gold rings were made for filming – but the ring's elvish inscription was added during post-production.

Source: http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,11764973%5E911,00.html

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As this exhibit travels around, I will attempt to keep TTFers aware of its various locations.

Barley

 

[Barliman Butterbur]

Riddle of the Rings

By Steve Meacham
December 24, 2004

Tolkien's mystical world of Middle Earth comes to life in a new exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum.

Four-time Oscar winner Richard Taylor - one of the creative geniuses behind the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy - is describing a place where fantasies are made. It's not Mordor, or Hogwarts, but a vast fun factory on the outskirts of New Zealand's windy capital.

Here, at the headquarters of Weta Workshop, is the world's most comprehensive special-effects facility. This is where 170 highly skilled masters of deception spend their days tricking us into believing their false universe is real.

"We've got everything here from chemists to sculptors, miniature builders to welders," Taylor says on the phone from Wellington. "Engineers, electronics experts, seamstresses. We have a very large leatherworking department. Plus two full-time swordsmiths who have had unbroken work at the company for nine years."

Obviously this was the city Tolkien built, along with Weta Digital, which focuses on "CGI" (computer-generated images). But Weta is no one-trick pony. As Taylor points out, "Since finishing Lord of the Rings, we've done Master and Commander, Peter Pan, The Last Samurai, Perfect Strangers, Hellboy, Van Helsing, I, Robot, Kingdom of Heaven, King Kong and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." He pauses for breath. "We're on another large feature film at the moment."

If this sounds like boasting, it's justified. Twelve years ago, Taylor and his Weta partners - including Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings - "realised there was going to be a serious change in the way that visual effects for film were going to be made". They formed Weta (named after a native New Zealand insect) and bought their first special-effects computer. By the time they made The Return of the King, the computer power they were able to harness made Weta Digital one of the world's five most powerful computer facilities (and that, Taylor says, includes military establishments).

Taylor is explaining the revolution that has occurred in movies in the past decade, and why a new exhibition that opens at the Powerhouse Museum on Boxing Day is so groundbreaking. Already, 800,000 fans in cities as far flung as Singapore and Boston have seen the awkwardly titled The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy - The Exhibition since it opened at New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, two years ago. At London's Science Museum, it attracted 260,000 people in less than four months.

No wonder most experts predict this will be the mother of all blockbuster exhibitions, eclipsing even the 214,000 who queued to see the Star Wars exhibition last year.

What makes The Lord of the Rings so special? For that matter, why have certain films and television shows - the Star Wars, Star Trek and James Bond series, Godzilla, Dr Who, even the puppetry of Thunderbirds - spawned exhibitions around the world when other, better ones have not?

Some reasons are obvious. The Lord of the Rings and James Bond movies - as well as the Harry Potter films (rumoured to be the subject of a forthcoming exhibition) - were all based on enormously popular books with cult followings. Star Trek and Thunderbirds were long-running TV series. All are sagas with episodic adventures and mythology built up over many years.

There are other similarities. Is it just coincidence that each of these movie series (even James Bond) has a clearly defined moral code?

Certainly, The Lord of the Rings has all the ingredients needed to make a good exhibition, argues Paul Brewer, of Te Papa Tongarewa, which realised even before the first movie was made that it offered New Zealand a unique opportunity to market its creative skills to the world.

"It has got this incredibly popular and credible literary background, based on one of the most popular books ever written," Brewer says.

"It has those wonderful themes of good versus evil, redemption, life and death. It touches the human psyche."

Some find this a bit highfalutin, including Kerrie Dougherty, a popular-culture expert who curated two previous Powerhouse crowd-pullers, Star Trek and Star Wars. You can build an exhibition around any film, she says, but there's no point doing it unless the movie has a committed following. The ones that have been successful are those that already had a cross-gender, cross-generational audience. Take Star Wars. Although people generally agree that the most recent movies in the series have been inferior to the originals, most of us know the Star Wars history, whether we're seven or 70, male or female, gay or straight.

But sheer longevity is not enough. "I can't see anyone making an exhibition out of the Police Academy movies, though there are plenty of them," Dougherty says. As for chick flicks, the Powerhouse did run a small exhibition about the costumes in Strictly Ballroom, but it's noticeable that most of the successful shows have featured some aspect of "boys' toys" - from 007's cars to Darth Vader's mask. That's partly because science fiction is a handy tool for explaining science itself.

Likewise, museums have found fantasy has a way of drawing in people unawares, teaching them about technological advances almost without them knowing it. In 1997, the Powerhouse's Star Trek show was little more than a collection of props. Star Wars, in 2002, was more ambitious. But the Lord of the Rings exhibition is the most sweeping yet, conceived from the outset - by Te Papa Tongarewa, Weta and New Line Cinema, which made the trilogy - as a celebration of the technological genius behind modern filmmaking.

Taylor admits there was much discussion within Weta about whether to "reveal the magic trick", to expose the fantasy. Jackson felt ignorance was bliss: what was important for the paying customers was the narrative journey they experienced when they sat in a darkened cinema for three hours. Thus, exhibitions like this involve risk. As Taylor puts it, "When you reveal what happens behind the scenes, some of the fabric of that mystery is rent." In the end, "what ultimately drove the decision [to go ahead] was the overwhelming desire from the world's fans to explore the movies at a greater level".

For Dougherty, what made The Lord of the Rings unique as a film trilogy was Jackson's use of state-of-the-art CGI techniques and traditional special-effects skills -

a marriage of computer nerd and model maker. A similar exhibition could not be made, she points out, from the Matrix movies, which relied almost totally on CGI.

One of the most popular stunts the new exhibition explains is the camera trickery that made two normal-sized actors - Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood - appear wildly different in size as Gandalf and Frodo. But it also dwells on the tangible - some of the 11,000 costumes made for the army of extras, as well as gigantic models of Treebeard and a cave troll.

Then there's the record-breaking number of prosthetics needed to make the fantasy figures feel real. "Hobbit feet apparently wear out very quickly," Dougherty says. "At one point, the filmmakers had more or less bought up the whole supply of latex in New Zealand so they could keep churning out the prosthetics. The special latex drying oven was going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, getting the prosthetics ready for the next day's shoot."

The model-maker's art is well represented. "Within the exhibition you'll see the beautifully detailed work that went into creating the models of the Tower of Orthanc and Sauron's tower in Mordor," Dougherty says. Plus, there's "the miniature of Hobbiton Mill, showing what might happen if the forces of evil were to conquer and destroy Hobbiton. It's wonderfully elaborate, yet it was only on screen a few seconds. All these traditional models and miniatures were used alongside CGI creatures like Gollum."

Of course, no exhibition on the genius of The Lord of the Rings would be complete without Gollum, one of the most mesmerising and intriguing rogues in cinema history. Powerhouse visitors will be shown exactly how Gollum leapt from the page of Tolkien's imagination to the "reality" of the screen through "motion capture" technology. The actor who played Gollum, Andy Serkis, was loaded up with sensors that relayed his movements back to a computer, which then allowed the filmmakers to create the grotesque character yet retain the human similarities.

Ultimately, though, what will visitors discover from this exhibition that they couldn't experience from a special-edition DVD?

Taylor answers the question best: "Our world is a busy and cluttered place because of the cultural references piled one on top of the other. We wanted the world of Middle Earth to feel equally saturated and detailed. There are things you'll never notice on screen, but if they weren't there Middle Earth wouldn't have seemed so real.

"What fans who have visited the exhibition have enjoyed is discovering a richness and cultural depth far beyond what they appreciated on film."

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/Film/Riddle-of-the-Rings/2004/12/23/1103391887838.html?oneclick=true#

Barley