When director Peter Jackson decided to take on production of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he turned to New Zealand, where in two years he directed the three movies in more than 100 of the country’s diverse locations. For state-of-the-art visual effects and postproduction, Jackson tapped WETA Digital, located in capital city Wellington, which took the effects world by storm, populating the New Zealand locations with hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs, and of course Gollum, one of the most sophisticated digital characters ever to appear on film.
The Lord of the Rings certainly brought attention to the country as a location with world-class production and post expertise, and longform work has been increasing ever since. Warner Bros.’ The Last Samurai, directed by Ed Zwick and starring Tom Cruise, was lensed in New Zealand, as were Sylvia, directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and Whale Rider, directed by Nikko Caro and starring Academy Award nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes. Television work has included The Power Rangers series for ABC Television.
"The Lord of the Rings has given the country international recognition," relates Julie Elstone, executive producer at commercial production company Silverscreen Productions, which maintains bases in Wellington, Auckland, and Sydney, Australia. "We’ve always had the capabilities and a flourishing production and postproduction market. The Lord of the Rings added credibility."
Elstone observes that more and more foreign productions stay in New Zealand for post, where previously they tended to shoot and leave. Adding to that factor is a favorable exchange rate (at press time, $1 U.S. was equivalent to $1.43 New Zealand) and ease of production. "We have film-friendly policies that make it easy to access locations and gain permission to film here," Elstone adds.
The country also features geographic diversity, as The Lord of the Rings demonstrated so well. "You can shoot on a beach in the morning and in a forest in the afternoon," Elstone points out. Indeed, New Zealand offers locations from snow-capped mountains to tropical rainforests to rolling plains. Mount Hood has been used to duplicate the Himalayas, and Queenstown’s Lake Wakatipu has doubled as British Columbia. The result? Roughly 40 percent of the commercial and feature work at Silverscreen comes from outside the region, from countries such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Norway and the U.K.
WETA is also now bidding on commercials, as well as feature work. (The company is represented in the U.S. by Becky Donahue and Marybeth Medernach.) While still in post on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the final installment of the trilogy, WETA Digital also finished a Jaguar commercial for Young & Rubicam, New York. Currently in production are the feature film I Robot and the DVD for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Peter Jackson’s next film, King Kong, is in pre-pro.
For the uninitiated, Investment New Zealand (which maintains offices in Los Angeles and New York) and Film New Zealand are available to international producers for information and assistance in arranging productions in New Zealand.
There are also production service companies, such as line production company Shoot New Zealand, which caters to production from North America and Europe. Its recent projects include BMW X3’s "Any," directed by Paul Street of bicoastal/international Believe Media for Fallon, Minneapolis. Executive producer Barbara Williams says that Rings has certainly increased the amount of feature production in New Zealand, but couldn’t say the same for the commercial industry.
Regardless of the reason, the commercial industry is busy. At Silverscreen, director Chris Dudman’s "No Brainer" won a Gold last fall at the London International Advertising Awards for Saatchi & Saatchi, Auckland’s anti-drug campaign. And at the end of 2003, Silverscreen added Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Jim Rygiel (The Lord of the Rings) into its directors’ fold. Rygiel’s background includes directing campaigns for clients including Geo Prism and Sony, and more recently, he was effects guru on films such as Lord of the Rings and Cliffhanger.
The spot production community in New Zealand also includes commercial computer animation specialists such as Auckland-based Flux Animation, which has a representation deal with U.S. animation shop Hornet, bicoastal. Recent credits out of Flux include Lotto’s "Cog," out of Saatchi & Saatchi, and directed by Brent Chambers of Flux, as well as the Chambers-directed "Saturday" for Westpac, also out of Saatchi & Saatchi. And digital intermediate pioneers The Post Unit, are located in Wellington (the shop handled digital color grading for The Lord of the Rings). With no official digital transition occurring in New Zealand, Silverscreen’s Elstone reports that most commercial houses are not HD-equipped yet. But she believes digital terrestrial television is coming, and that the switch to HD production is inevitable.
R&D
The Lord of the Rings production also put emphasis on New Zealand’s technical R&D in the film production world. Notably, last weekend the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science (AMPAS)’s Board of Governors awarded a Scientific and Engineering Award to software developer Stephen Regelous for the design and development of Massive, the autonomous agent animation software used for the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings. The award was presented in Pasadena, Calif., during the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards presentation (see story, p. 7).
According to AMPAS, Massive takes a new approach in simulating behaviors of large numbers of computer-generated extras (agents). Each agent contains a primitive software "brain" used to develop behavioral rules simulating a wide range of behaviors. In The Lord of the Rings, more than 200,000 agents were controlled in several scenes.
The software was developed for the trilogy, but will soon have applications worldwide. In ’02, Massive Software was launched with Regelous as founder and project manager. Diane Holland, CEO/managing director of Massive, has worked in both the commercial and feature arena, and is an alum of such leading visual effects companies as Industrial Light + Magic, San Rafael, Calif.; Digital Domain, Venice, Calif.; and Sony Pictures, Culver City, Calif.
Massive development will continue, and the software seems destined to be used more frequently in the commercial world. The first use of Massive for a commercial application took place at The Mill, London and New York, which last fall created digital crowds for Sony PlayStation’s "Mountain" via TBWA, London; the ad was directed by Frank Budgen of London’s Gorgeous Enterprises. (Budgen is repped stateside by bicoastal Anonymous Content.) Even though 500 extras per day were used during production of "Mountain" in Brazil, the end result needed to be much busier. The Mill’s 3-D artist Jordi Bares used Massive to create thousands of climbing and running digital characters. In the most sophisticated shot, Bares created 146,000 digital people that had unique vision, sound and touch-based artificial intelligence, giving them realistic individual behavior.
