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- Might & Magic Novel available
It is called 'The Sea of Mist (Might & Magic #1)', and is written by Ml Odom - you can grab it at Amazon
- Works on The Lord of the Rings Movie are finished:
'Fellowship' One Flight Closer
WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- Over the weekend a precious cargo reached the shores of the United States -- the final cut of the first film of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
From that final cut will come 10,000 prints of The Fellowship of the Rings, which will be spread around the globe for its public launch on Dec. 19. The film contains "a lot of love and blood, sweat and tears, and I think it shows in it; and it's quite special to all of us," said Lord of the Rings producer Barrie Osborne.
Getting the film just right continued to the last minute.
"Howard (Shore) came up with another idea at the 11th hour, so we inserted the new music work and carried on mixing until 1:30 (Saturday morning, New Zealand time) and finished making our print master about an hour ago," he said.
The finished film "all goes out by plane today. Just for safety we are having people hand carry it," Osborne said.
Just a week earlier, the visual effects were being finalized. The finishing touches consisted of special color processing to get the look of Middle Earth. The special processing was needed "because (director) Peter (Jackson) wanted to achieve a look for Middle Earth that he couldn't achieve through traditional film techniques," said Jon Labrie, Weta Digital's chief technical officer.
In some sequences, Labrie explains, there is a "desaturated" look, and in others the color is more saturated. "I'm not going to tell you why or how, but basically Peter wanted to get a color feel that he couldn't have achieved otherwise," Labrie said.
In total, Weta Digital produced 570 shots for The Fellowship of the Rings. The industry average for a computer graphics shot is 10 seconds, with each shot containing 240 frames and six or seven different elements. "We had shots on the Lord of the Rings that were 1,400 frames long with 27 elements," Labrie said. "That would be probably one of the biggest."
Depicting a scene such as the destruction of Isengard -- the wizard Saruman's stronghold -- draws on a phalanx of skills. In an Isengard scene, one element might be a complex miniature made by Weta Workshop. The background comes through a detailed matte painting, and Weta's Massive software provides the character animation.
To work on the project, the number of digital artists at Weta Digital nearly doubled in the past year, from 90 a year ago to 160 by the time the film was finished.
Weta's computing power jumped as well: It had only one rack of 32 processors a year ago. But now Weta Digital's renderwall houses 392 processors that give the artists the power they need. Adding in the processors on workstations, Weta Digital now has almost 800 processors. For the second film of the trilogy, Labrie expects the company to use about 1,200 processors.
Work has already begun on the visual effects for the second film, The Two Towers. "Even if there are no more shots in terms of count, the complexity of the shots is higher," Labrie said.
"That's not trivial, that's hard. Weta certainly has its work cut out for it on Film 2," Labrie said. | | Source: Herr-der-Ringe-Film |
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