The View Through The Lens: Day six!

Here it is. Wow.
Day six. Okay okay I'm going really slowly with this. Bear with me. The next few days should be a little faster. Well, at least I hope so. And don't remind me about all the PotWs I have to catch up on. I'll get it done. When is the question. Not if. When.

This day was our big Lord of the Rings day. We started at about eight in the morning and didn't get home until five or six that evening. But details like that aren't important. Back to important stuff.

Stuff like our first stop. That being Ithilien. The most recognizable scene there is where Sam and Frodo are watching the Haradrim come through. To get to the proper vantage point we had to walk around the "set". As we were walking I noticed how extremely familiar the scene looked, through it wasn't until we came around to the camera viewpoint that it clicked and I recognized the scene. Our guide showed us the "call sheet" for one of the days of filming at that location. It included every single little detail for the day's filming, including things like food, maps, extras details, and so on and so forth. Certainly pretty interesting stuff. Our guide had a friend who was one of the Haradrim and thus had an interesting perspective on those particular scenes. All those lines of Haradrim walking across the gravel "field"? The same sets of extras, each filmed seperately and stacked together. They only had about twenty or thirty guys there for that. Each extra was assigned a number, and when that number was called all the extras with that number would "die". The arrows were then editted in later to the guys that died. On one the days of filming while they were waiting to start another take, a group of canyoners came down unwittingly into the film set. The first and, for a while, only thing they saw was the group of extras dressed up as Haradrim. The extras all exchanged a glance, and, wordlessly, starting marching on the canyoners in a threatening manner. Predictably, when faced with a group of outlandishly dressed warriors, the canyoners freaked out and started to run. We also saw in the same area one of the scenes where Sam and Frodo were being led by the rangers to the secret place. At that point in the filming the scale doubles for the hobbits were used because they were standing right next to a human. Apparently though because of the blindfolds they kept tripping and stumbling while being forced down the hill. Same problem as the Uruks at Amon Hen.

Interesting side note: remember all the white flowers on the graves of Theodin's forefathers? Those are all fake. They were modeled off of a real flower which Peter Jackson really liked for that scene, but they never grow close together and only bloom for a very tiny part of the year. In short, it was impossible to have that many flowers at one time. So he had them all made of silk (somewhere in Southeast Asia, I believe. I want to say Taiwan but I don't think that's right). While he was at it he had them made a little bigger as well, as the actual flower is tiny. It's about the same size as a Bermudiana (link).

After our tour of Ithilien (which was a little more than an hour) we made our way back into Queenstown for lunch. For those of you who have been paying attention, you should notice that this is a pretty early lunch. Except I didn't tell you that the drive was about forty-five minutes one way. Moving on. Lunch. It was a hobbit-like meal, being various meats and cheeses with bread. All served on one communal dish. During lunch our guide handed us copies of the scripts for the movies. The actual scripts. For all three movies. And they were full of typos. Full. In addition, we got to look at the Weta Workshop calendar; a hand-drawn calendar full of little jokes and things. For example, in the first week of one month a day was labeled "Rivendell design day". About a week later there was a day labeled "Rivendell re-design day". Five days or so after that; "Rivendell re-re-design day". And another week later there was "Rivendell 'I think we're getting it now' day". In October there was a Monday labeled, "Persistent Media Spy Day". The next day was, "Persistent Media Spy Day: The Sequel". Wednesday was, "More Persistent Media Spy Day". Thursday was, "Thank God for Security Day". And so on and so forth throughout the calendar.

After lunch we were off to another part of the Anduin River. Remember the part of the Anduin we saw "near" Te Anau? That place was just after the Argonath in the movie. Here we were, however, in Queenstown, visiting the place where the Argonath was. Unfortunately they've taken the statues down (much to the delight of the folks over at the Burj Kalhifa) so I got Jordan and Abigail to stand in. I didn't tell them I had taken the picture, though, so they stood there for a few minutes before realizing what fools they looked like. The road we had to take to get to that vantage point was extremely windy and right along the edge of a steep cliff. At the other end of the road was a winery owned by some people with a good sense of humour, as evidenced by the two warning signs on the road; "Steep cliffs. Parachute required" and "Speed Camera".

The next stop on this tour was another Anduin location. This time it was for the opening scene in "The Fellowship of the Ring", where Isildur is ambushed by orcs and loses the ring. The only trouble was that it was late summer/early fall unlike when the scene was shot, which was in the middle of winter. Also, the river at that point is only a few inches deep; not quite the great and mighty Anduin like one might expect. Our guide also explained how on the call sheet for that scene there was a "Stunt rock" listed. Also, the poor stunt double for Isildur had to float like a dead body in freezing cold water several times. I feel sorry for that guy; he did all the hard work for Isildur while the actor mostly just stood around in the few scenes which included him. But the actor gets all the credit. A short drive later we stopped at one of the two locations at which the Fords of Bruinen was filmed. Just up river from us there were some people panning for gold. It certainly seemed like a pointless task, but our guide told us that one of his friends panned for gold and had actually found some little bits of gold. So there you go.

The last stop was at the top of a moutain from which we could see the whole valley. It was a stunning view. From there we could see the Remarkables range (well, we could see them from almost anywhere around Queenstown, but this was the best vantage point) and our guide pulled out a bunch of swords and stuff from the Lord of the Rings. He had the swords of Theodin, Eowyn, Boromir, Arwen, Legolas' knives, Gimli's ax, Sting, Narsil (the hilt) and Anduril, Aragorn's curved knife and a Morgul blade. On top of that there were a few rings (including Aragorn's ring, the name escapes me), a hobbit cloak, and Gimli's helmet. The pictures describe them infinitely better than I can, so I'll just say that after waving them about for a good half hour we pilled back into the van and headed home.

You'll notice that on the pictures from this last stop there are those three black spots I was babbling about earlier on this blog. If you didn't notice them in the most recent pictures you'll see them here for sure.