THE HOBBIT Production Diary 7

Hi, so welcome to our new blog. We've taken you away with us on location, but we thought that today you might enjoy having a little look into our studio, Stone Street. With the public obviously unallowed in here while we're shooting. Morning. But we thought it would be great to give you all a private little tour around the world of The Hobbit here at Stone Street in Miramar, New Zealand. Used to be an old paint factory. We got hold of it just before we started Lord of the Rings. We built one sound studio for Lord of the Rings. We built another one on King Kong and we built a couple more here for The Hobbit. And it's actually a great place to make movies right now. Hi, this is block four, the production office. Come on in. This is the office and our boss, Bridget York. You may first get a plan for how it's stored. I'm working very hard on this folder here. Have you got some filing skills? It's top secret. Okay, good. I'm learning how to open and close it. Emma, processing contracts in the mother freighter of three foot seven. Kate Mulligan will find you whatever crazy thing you need. And this is Rach. She coordinates and distributes all our script revisions. Hi there. I've just got some urgent script revisions to go out to all cast immediately. So I'm just going to hand these ones over to Mike. He's going to take them over to Jimmy Nesbitt for us. Jimmy. Don't look at me directly in the eyes. Oh, hello. Thorin. Bard. Gandalf. Nothing for me. Come in. And see the world that we inhabit here for the last 25 years. Decorated the trailer with things that remind me of home. Villages and the seaside in Northern Ireland where I am from. My horse, Riverside Theatre. That was Martin. He plays one of the characters in it. And there's the main character, me, Bofor. Hello everybody. My name's Luke Evans and I play Bard. And I'm going to take you on a little trip around Trailer Park. We have 21 trailers where we've been living for the last seven and a half years. This is Aidan. Oh, look at this. Killy. He's my neighbor. How are these guys? I don't know. They're just trying to show them around. Stephen. How are you? There's a long time we spend here sometimes, isn't there? When they're setting up scenes and things like that. It takes a long time. So, um. It's like flatting, isn't it? Basically. What's flatting? Do you know? They keep all the young, good looking lads at one end. See, all the ugly buggers. They just don't want to mix with us. That was rubbish. Where's the green frog? Good morning. And welcome to Stone Street. I'm just off to my prosthetics. Morning all. Okay, so this is my spot currently with the lovely Rachel. And now we're about to start the process. Come and see me again in a couple of hours when I'll look radically different. Two hours later. Here we are. Hey Peter, we are traveling in five. Okay. Hey guys. Come with me. We'll take you to the AD's port-a-com. Home for a lot of us. So down here in the AD's port-a-com, we've got 11 AD's who work on main unit. We come up with a bit of a plan and then we run it from here. Action. So, on with the show. Locations department decided to put some beautiful pictures up of sunny New Zealand. Here in Wellington, we get sunny days, but they are few and far between. We get a lot of rain. Got a wet ass. But we also get hail. Lots of hail. Coming down to block three, there's some busy little bees down there. Hey guys, how you doing? Welcome to the Hobbit stunt department. I just died. Okay, so this is an intense thing we like to bring on set every day. Hopefully you enjoy it. Okay, come on guys, let's go. We're not set. Come on, let's go. Hi, welcome to the hair and makeup department. Here we are on day 5,953 of shooting. And we're now actually trying to repair the wigs that have been doing the barrel sequence for the past three days. As you can see, this wig's a lovely, lovely natural blonde color. Whereas the other wigs that we've now got here, which have been bleached. And so now I have to try and turn these wigs back into this wig. So that's my job for the rest of the day, to get all the wigs ready for Monday. Here we are in the costume workshop. And we've got racks lined up here for all our dwarves, because we have to do constant repeats for their stunt doubles, their photo doubles. Then we've got our flesh factory, where three people have been making the dwarf fat suit components. So this is A stage. This is the stage that we built in time for Lord of the Rings. It was our biggest stage then. So we did things like Elrond's chamber at Rivendell, where the Council of Elrond took place. B stage has amazingly enough been used for a lot of shooting. There was a lot of Lord of the Rings. Bag End was built here in B stage. You can hardly call it a studio, really. It's just an old tin shed. Kind of feels a bit like I'm driving the Tram at Universal Studios, I guess. Over here, we do have our biggest sound stage, which is called K stage. K being named after King Kong. We've had some pretty big set pieces in here recently. Mirkwood Forest and some of the Trollshaw Forest scenes. Here we have F and G. These are our two newest stages, being built specifically for The Hobbit. They've pretty much got the latest technology inside them and rather large extraction units for all those fires and flames and smoke. At the very end of the studios is the art department, the home of Dan Henner, Alan Lee, and John Howell. Morning, guys. Welcome to the art department. Come on in. I think the production designer is in. G'day, Dan. How are you, boy? All good? Fantastic. We've got six weeks and two days of principal photography left. We're shooting the Sluices at the moment, which is film on sets. We're very busy. And this over here is our set decorator, Ra Vincent. Hi, come with me. I've got something very cool to show you. This is my favorite place. It brings into play all of the ideas from all the individual contributors in the art department. And they get to share all their ideas in here. And this is where the first spark of inspiration begins. And in this office is Alan Lee and John Howell. I'm Alan. I'm John. Good afternoon. We basically sit here all day long doing drawings. Three years of it, a couple of thousand drawings each. And amazingly enough, we're still having fun. We see the light at the end of the tunnel and we thought for a second, ooh, it might be a train that turns out it's a dragon. Come through this way, I'll take you through to the model makers. Calligrapher, Daniel Reeve. And this way to the model makers. So we have many models we have to make. We've done approximately 115 sets to date. And each one of those sets, we try to make a model to show Peter before we begin construction. That kind of thing's nice. We've got this model we showed Peter this morning. There's a few adjustments we have to make for it. And then we'll be straight into construction of this. We shoot this in one week's time. Welcome guys. We're here on the backstage. Come on in. That's where our main unit's shooting today. We're doing a scene here for film one. And it's a scene in the troll cave. So follow me, we'll come here. Got Zane, our lovely producer. Ian and Richard, who's leaving. And follow me, we'll go on set, but I'm quietly there, rehearsing there. I'm Corin, I'm the booth swinger. This is Tony, the sound recordist. These are some of the newer stages. Had soundproofing, which makes it fantastic for us, being as there's an airport just over the hill that way. This is the first production that's been in here. And one of the biggest things is this headroom up here now, so the guys can walk all the way down these walkways without bumping their head on stuff. I'm the specialist roof dweller. It's handy if you don't have a fear of heights. Very embarrassing if you drop something. Plus you're two dozen beer. All right, shooting. Shooting. But now we're just gonna, shh, walk away. They're gonna shoot. My name's Dion, I'm head of technology on The Hobbit. Just gonna show you through my office and my space, known as the tin shed. Come on in. We look after the technology, rigs, cameras. This rig here is a surface rig for shooting on water. Going in the next couple of days to shoot a very exciting sequence with the dwarfs. She's all wireless and all made here in Wellington over the last couple of weeks. Well, g'day. You've seen some pretty good technology back there in the tin shed, I understand. Come have a look out here because this is pretty basic technology. This is where we've built a humongous green screen. This is called the back lot. Now, the back lot is where we shoot all sorts of the outdoor scenes. They can be battle scenes, they can be wet sets, and obviously being a green screen, the backgrounds can be changed later on in post-production. Have a look down here. Well, now you can see we're on top of a green screen. This rig up here is a rig designed by Tony Kelly, This rig holds huge shade cloth to block the sun off when we're filming in it. We don't want the sun going in and out of the cloud all day. Crikey, what's going on down here? This is nine square. It's pretty complicated. Get the ball, hit it to the next player, get it out of your square as quickly as possible. Anything on the line is always contentious. It's all about attitude. Do not give in, do not make eye contact, make your forward try. You've got to lie your way through it. It's always the umpire's call. Guys, please, I'm trying to do something. This is where we store the lead weapons. You can see a multitude of boxes. Each box is one lead character's weapons. This is Gloin's box of beauties, and they belong to Gimli in the Lord of the Rings, and Gloin, his father, for the Hobbit. Action. Gloin! They are, in fact, the same axe, they've just been made in two different sizes. I think we've now reached about four scales for every weapon we make. Probably about time that you went down to see who made all these weapons. Weather Workshop. Very easy, just round the corner. Out the front drive, it makes you take a right. You go past the tie place, then turn left. You're all the way down the end of the road. Don't stop, you'll get to the end. The road's a 90 degree turn, you need to turn or else you'll hit Weather Workshop. Why don't you guys come on in? It's pretty crazy at the moment. Come on down here. It's all cars, weapons, end up in clean up, and this young chap, Alec, is madly trying to get the axes finished. Bow strings. Weapons lined up for the day's painting. So Kiri's just putting the aging pass on quite a decent croquet hammer. Another painting area, this is models. The milling department. Injection molding out of this gun. Spraying, trimming, sanding. Engineering. Bending, cutting, dyeing. Sculpting. Mold making. Flashing. Baking. Foam filling. And then for every one of the lead actors that has a full prosthetic, and of course with Biffa, his axe, we also make scale doubles of these. Welcome to the scaly port-a-com. Hi, I'm Callie. I'm Sophie. I'm Brendan, and this is Biffa, the hopeless romantic. We're scale doubles, so we spend a lot of time being short. Yeah, we paid to be short. They wanted us for our bodies. Hey, have you guys seen the behind the scenes team yet? I know where they are. Follow me. What are you doing? I've been filming the blog. It's like a pet project. Filming the blog? Yeah. That's very good, but shouldn't you be killing orcs or something? Shouldn't you be directing a movie? Yeah. Right, so here we are at the end of the blog. Hope you've enjoyed this tour around our little world down here in Miramar, New Zealand. I hope you've particularly enjoyed the camera work. I thought it was terrific. Wonderful. In fact, I think we should take that wig off and get you behind the camera. I'll take over the role, don't worry. You want to be Legolas, right? Kieran as Legolas. This is a done deal. Hey, so we're going to come back with another blog when we wrap in a few weeks time, or shortly after we wrap. So look forward to our final blog of our shooting period coming up soon. The bitter end. The happy end.