The Lord of The Rings

You have watched all three films (totalling 11 straight hours). But even then there may be one or two thing you do not know about Lord of the Rings . We have managed to unearth a few wondrous bu little-known fact about the making of the film trilogy.

MIDDLE-EARTH IS REAL

The fantastic world where the Lord of the Rings  story takes place is in fact near Birmingham, England. As a child J.R.R. Tolkien, the writer, loved to play in the area which is now known as Moseley. In the film, Middle-Earth is located in New-Zealand, but you don’t know exactly where it is, says director Peter Jackson. That is the beauty of New-Zealand. It has fields that look like England, mountains that could double as the Swiss Alps, or beautiful lakes like those in Italy. It is as though Tolkien walked across New Zealand, and then sat down to start writing. Sometimes we moved giants sets of legs past the Hobbit actors to make them appear small, says visual effects supervisor Jim Ryhiel. Other times the human actors and the Hobbit actors played separately against blue screen, and the images were combined digitally. Nearly every part of the production was handmade. More than 10,000 make-up pieces were made to turn humans into Elves, Hobbits, Orcs and so on. 50,000 swords, axes. shields and spears- most of them rubber and safety weapons- were needed. Ten people worked for three years making wigs. Before the cameras started rolling on the Wellington set in New-Zealand, Maoris blessed the location. There was a huge ceremony with the cast and crew. A couple of thousand people stopped what they were doing and the Maoris performed a ritual. They said that if we treated the land with respect, the land would take good care of us. And i must say i did. Shooting the 3 films took 274 days. When i agreed to do 15 months, i don’t think i had any idea what that really meant, actor Sean Astin says. It was 2 birthdays for my daughter, who makes her acting debut in Lord of the Rings as a Hobbit. Before actor Christopher Lee, who plays Saruman, the evil wizard, was taken on, he had read The Lord of the Rings 20 times: once each year for 20 years. The actors long period of working together made them close friends. We were always hanging out together in town. We all took up surfing together, says Astin. And in the end we all got a matching tattoo- in Elf script it says The Nine. Everyone got them in different places. Mine is on my ankle- the Hobbit foot. Somehow we felt we were one large family in a special place called Middle-Earth.