This is only news if, like me, you’re a raging Lord of the Rings fan who’s so excited about The Hobbit you want to see anything and everything even remotely related to it. Is that you? Then let’s hold hands and go on this journey to the Lonely Mountain together.

The One Ring has photos snapped from lurking around The Hobbit set, currently filming in New Zealand. They didn’t actually get their cameras aimed at the set but they did get some lovely shots of the trailers around it. More importantly they got our first ever shot of Andy Serkis back at work, in his Gollum, motion-capture unitard.

Here he is:



For anyone who spent time watching all the amazing bonus materials on the Lord of the Rings: EE’s this is a familiar site. For those of you who didn’t, here’s the way this works. Gollum is a computer generated character, but his performance isn’t really computer generated. Scenes featuring Gollum are filmed with Andy Serkis right there, acting out the part as if he is Gollum, but wearing that rather silly looking suit which helps the animators capture his performance. He’s then replaced by the CGI version of the character, which mirrors what he does. And that, is how you make CGI characters look good. For some reason, even a decade later, very few other films bother to do this, and it’s a good example of how special effects haven’t really gotten all that much better since LOTR.

The One Ring has a few more pictures of trailers around The Hobbit set. Click over there to see the rest.