The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

For so long, everyone thought adapting the entire Lord of the Rings book series into live-action motion pictures was impossible, yet Peter Jackson did it, hooking audiences in with this first of the epic trilogy. Under his direction, an immense plethora of previously established special effects techniques were expanded upon, and those new techniques went on to inspire other movie studios with their tentpole blockbusters. Today, these originally out-of-the-box approaches to combining digital and practical effects are still at work in the industry and are still growing fast.

​Among those techniques included the miniature sets surrounded by digital backgrounds, yet the biggest achievement was the use of forced perspective to make the actors playing the Hobbits appear tiny when next to the other human characters. To sell the illusion, duplicate versions of the same set were built, with one at a smaller scale when filming shots of the regular-sized human characters. Even then, the extra mile was run: digital shots combined Ian McKellen and Ian Holm into the same frame and had them exchange props with one another, extras with giant animatronic hands passed by the actors, and dummies were used when the Hobbit actors’ faces didn’t have to be seen. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring set the stage for what the trilogy did for movies—now any filmmaker can feel comfortable with adapting anything.

PG-13 (V)
Fantasy/Action
2 hr. 58 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.