Rygiel on Lord of the Rings

Lord of the Rings creative genius Jim Rygiel rocked. I spent time chatting with him last night and since I’m not a digital creative genius, we mostly connected on life in New Zealand, where he spent four years working on the Lord of the Rings film and I worked on a South Island farm a good ten+ years ago.

He references Florida’s talk. “He’s right,” says Rygiel. “I come from the same background. We have become the digital migrant workers. That’s what we refer to it in the film industry. I can create all of the Lord of the Rings on my laptop if I need to.”

Apparently there were over 23,000 people who were brought down to New Zealand for all four films. No small project. He claims that everyone wanted to see the film succeed, not just those who were working on the film, but native kiwis. New Zealanders are wholeheartedly trying to get technology established down there and this was a way to jumpstart the process.

He shows us the breakdown of the Lord of the Rings. “We did a lot of digital hobbits and digi doubles,” he explains and then shows us some examples on screen. Film making is increasingly becoming more digital. He goes on, “People keep asking me whether this will replace real actors over time. I say, ‘why would we want to do that?’ The actor is the soul of the character. If I had 400 designers creating one character, you’d have a combination of 400 personalities in one character rather than the soul of the one live actor.”

He tells us about the upcoming film Polar Express which will also use these effects. Tom Hanks will apparently be a digital character. Imagine the Tom Hanks’ personality coming through a digital character!!

He shows a few shots of digital doubles. It’s remarkable how close they were able to match the real live model with the digital character. They used a computer controlled camera that mimics every move. “We had digital switchers so we could look at the compositing software as we put them together,” he adds.

He laughs – “Oddly enough they only have twenty horses in New Zealand. Thank god for digital images.” They used digital horses and real horses. “It was a large puzzle that we put together in the end. You lose the idea that there’s digital effects going on after awhile because they all blend together. At some point, you give up trying to figure out what’s digital and what’s not and simply watch the movie.”

He was down-to-earth, genuine and interesting when we chatted last night. The same personality came through on-stage. His style was casual and witty – “People always ask me how did you create such a realistic digital creature,” he says. “What brings them together for me is a combination of so many different elements. If you miss one of them, you miss it altogether. The key elements are great lighting and rendering, the ‘motion,’ and great lines and writing. Without any one of those, we would have ended up with bad digital characters. The character needs to have all these elements to be successful.”

He shows a clip of what director Peter Jackson would hand him to ‘turn around.’ They shot most of it against a blue screen, they would deconstruct it and then figure out what to do based on the result the director wanted.

He then shows us the digital animation layered over another plate and how they would have to paint the details back in over the plate. It was unbelieveably freaky. We are seeing behind the scenes revolutionary “film making” here.

He claims that Hollywood is trying to hold on as tight as they can, however frankly, it’s no longer necessary to shoot there anymore. “I predict that in less than five years, its going to be all high definition digital films. The ability to take those digital outputs and stream those across to a company in New Zealand, England, or frankly anywhere, will become an increasingly easy to thing to do.”

Hollywood is based on this film distribution system. The moment theaters get this digital projection. anyone can start making films and sending them to a theater. WOW. The audience starts clapping and whistling. Clearly, the whole process of keeping it in Hollywood is liquidizing as the quality of digital improves. The next thing that’s going to start happening more and more is the digital distribution of a film.

Kudos to Jim Rygiel, who worked for Pacific Electric Pictures, one of the earliest companies to employ computer animation for the advertising and film markets over twenty years ago. His credits there include Starship Troopers, Species, Outbreak, Air Force One, The Scout, The Last Action Hero, Cliffhanger, Batman Returns, Alien III, and Ghost. After Boss Films closure he went on to supervise The Parent Trap, Star Trek: Insurrection, Anna and the King, and 102 Dalmatians. He received the American Film Institute's first AFI Digital Effects Artist of the Year award, the Academy Award and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for Best Visual Effects for his work on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.