Saturday, March 08, 2014
Here's How They Made The Hobbit's Amazing Barrel Escape Scene
Underwire | Wired.com: Of all the scenes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Peter Jackson cites the escape from the elves as one of his favorites. So in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the director went to great lengths to make Bilbo and the dwarves’ wine-barrel-enabled getaway from Thranduil’s realm into an epic seven-minute action sequence. How’d he do it?
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8 comments:
840:1...I have worked on a few films, nothing big, but from school project movies to a high grade amateur film, the one thing that always surprises me is the footage ratio. I usually work around 10:1, because it takes that much time to get the lines right, and then with edit time and setup and strike...the process for a five minute movie is hours and hours! Now putting 80 times that in for one sequence, and then doing all of the cgi for the water effects and such, I can't even fathom that. It's impressive that anyone would have the attention span to deal with that and put it all together. That specific scene was my favorite scene from films from last year, except the Great Gatsby party scene.
I am always amazed by the crazy amount of work that goes into creating movies, especially once CGI comes into play, adding a huge number of elements to be controlled by those technicians. That much care and work definitely pays off, because I remember really liking that sequence and noticing how much work must have gone into creating it. Doing a scene like this would have been nearly impossible without CGI, and it this goes to show that those kinds of technology have become an indispensable part of big action-type movies these days.
The ratio of 843:1 is quite astonishing, however I did not find it very surprising that a scene of this complexity took this long. Similarly to Peter Jackson, this is also my favorite scene in the books and the in the movie. For me, it felt like this scene was the only one that actually felt real and the rest felt to CGI'd. That is what surprised me, the fact that this scene, with all the CGI that went into it. This being said, the work that these film technicians put into the work that they did was amazing. I wish that this amount of realism translated into the rest of the film. Maybe after watching 98 hours of filming the crew started to get tired.
I love things like this because it shows us just how much detail and artistic care goes into making movies and entertainment. It was crazy seeing and hearing about all the CGI work that went into making that just one scene. I was also intrigued by the amount of "non-CGI" work that also went into making the scene. It was exciting seeing the rapids that were created just for this scene. In the clip they said it resembled an amusement park rapid ride. It brings to mind the incredible worlds that Disney creates and how real those thrill rides are. In this case though, the rapids are only being used once and then they are practically useless. I am hoping to eventually go into production design, and I would love to work on a movie like this, where my dreams can become a reality with the amazing technology we have today.
This was the best scene of the entire movie, hands down so thank you CMU blog gods for posting this. The amount that went into this one scene is really incredible. 98 hours of film paired down to the seven minutes just shows how much money this production is given for all the set up, the staff, the time, and the technology available to the movie. The amount that had to be simulated when editing makes me think why they really bothered to do so much on site filming, but that question is really just due to my ignorance on the subject.
When we go to movies these days we are constantly expecting more and leave unimpressed of what we saw. I haven't seen the Hobbit yet, but the attention to detail that went into this shot was incredible. Each tiny movement had to be thought out completely and required a lot of time to get the perfect composition. 842:1 ration is insane, its crazy that productions can afford these levels of productions and have enough money to spend on their productions. I would love to work on this level of productions one day, for the possibilities are almost endless.
Wow. Just wow. I was well aware that this scene was likely not an easy one for the filmmakers to pull off, but I never would have guessed just how much work went into it. 840:1 is a gigantic ratio, meaning that for every minute of finished project, 14 hours went into it's creation. I love the blending of CG and practical work that went into making the scene. This scene is also my favorite from the book, and now from the movie as well, and they did a great job on it.
This is an incredibly interesting article. Like everyone before me is saying, the 840:1 ratio is absolutely mind blowing along with the almost seamless blending of CGI and FX is just really really cool. It is really phenomenal to think about where the movie industry is heading and how advanced effects and motion capture and CGI is. I'm thinking back to the article about how the movie Gravity was filmed and am further reaffirmed that there are pretty cool things happening right now in movies.
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