You’d see them in a wide shot, and then you weren’t paying attention so much to the scale of the riders or the feathers, but when you went in for the blue-screen shots where you saw the riders who were on the buck we use to put the bird underneath them, that’s when we would kind of adjust the size.”
“We would scale the feathers down so they looked more correct to the riders, because you never saw both, really. But when you put the riders on their back for those close-up shots, those really big feathers looked out of place. If you scaled them down and made more feathers then it wouldn’t look like an eagle anymore. We would bring the size of the feathers down because they’re big birds, and if you see them in a wide shot- you expect them to look like eagles, but if you think about that, it means they’ve got these really huge feathers. “I think the only time we cheated that was on the close-up shots where you saw riding on their backs. Gandalf (Ian McKellen) atop one of the eagles. We tried to be as faithful as possible, and then really just scaled the whole thing up. “Because they were eagles, we followed real birds as much as possible the layout of the feathers, the guide feathers, the tail feathers, the way it’s all layered, from the beak and around the eyes and back onto the neck. There was a lot of just going in and fixing everything by hand to make sure that all the feathers layered properly. In those days, you really couldn’t, so we had to guide it a little bit more by hand.
#Lord of rings monster software#
We’ve gotten better at the software that we need to do that and computers have gotten a lot faster so we can rely on them more. You need to lay out all the feathers and let the computer run through all the calculations of what piece is colliding with what other piece. “To really do it properly, you need to just run big simulations. Return of the King screenwriter Philippa Boyens reflects on Éowyn’s ‘I am no man!’ There and back again: A history of The Lord of the Rings in video games Return of the King’s soup-eating Gondorian guard tells his LOTR story