Peter Jackson has never hesitated to share many, many steps of the production of his films on his Facebook page, but yesterday he went into serious overdrive. To commemorate the final-- yes, actual final this time-- day of production on The Hobbit, Jackson essentially liveblogged his entire day in production, from waking up and snapping a photo of his cat before leaving the house to the detailed description of each individual soundstage where production was taking place. The above photo you see is the final one, of Richard Armitage as Thorin going to battle against a character that will be green-screened in later. Here's how Jackson described the day he'd chosen to document so thoroughly:
I've been lying here in pitch darkness, watching fight rehearsals over and over again. Our stunt co-ordinatior, Glen Boswell, worked with the actors last weekend, designing some climatic battle moments. He filmed them, and I have them on my iPad, in an application we wrote called "WingNut TV". It's a program that allows a huge amount of material to be catalog used and updated each day over the Internet. It contains all our dailies, edited films, previs, music, and much more. I'm looking at the fights, figuring out the angles I'll need to film them today. A huge amount to do, and it needs to get done.Our shoot day starts at 8.30am, and is supposed to finish at 7.30pm. I suspect we'll be working late. Whenever we work a long day, I joke with the crew that I'm just softening them up for when Jim Cameron shows up in Wellington to shoot Avatar 2 and 3. Well ... It's not really a joke.
The photos he posted include several dwarves hanging out behind the scenes, three different sizes of actors to play Thorin Oakenshield (in real life Richard Armitage is a very un-dwarf-sized 6'2"), some music "spotting" with composer Howard Shore, and even some truly inexplicable stuff, like these two people dressed up as penguins in front of a green screen. Jackson swears, "Yes, we did actually just film this." Given that everything from the shoot day will be in The Hobbit: There And Back Again, not in theaters until next December, we'll have to wait a while to see for ourselves:
Obviously the world has never lacked for insight into Peter Jackson's production process--there are more bonus features on the Lord of the Rings DVDs than endings of Return of the King, and the many technical innovations of The Hobbit mean he's spent a lot of time explaining things like 48 fps and unveiling footage via live blog. But look back over Jackson's Facebook page and you can still marvel at the many, many moving parts in just a single day of production on The Hobbit, and how much he has to keep an eye on at once-- while managing to post to Facebook at the same time! With The Hobbit now actually wrapping production, we probably won't have routine looks behind the scenes of a major film like this until, well, whatever Jackson makes next.
Finally, here's a photo that's not at all from yesterday's final day of shooting-- Martin Freeman wrapped production weeks ago-- but is very much worth your attention. As Jackson puts it, it's Smaug admiring Bilbo's feet! Or you might prefer to see it as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in disguise. Whatever works.
