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WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects
Xoanon (from TheOneRing.net) writes "I was recently privileged enough to view a lecture by Milton Ngan. As far as IT stuff goes, Milton has a pretty good job. You see, he is the Digital Operations Manager at Weta Digital. He is basically the architect for all the technical side of things at Weta. Last night he came and gave a 1 hour lecture at Victoria University outlining the hurdles and obstacles that needed to be overcome to produce the stunning 3D graphics lying in each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The lecture itself was full of lots of facts about Weta, the IT side of things and it also included some very cool behind the scenes shots of The Two Towers. The following is a detailed report from the event, where Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations. There is also a TON of info in regards to the special effects process, and news about MASSIVE. Take a look."
Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.
Obviously when he started LotR they hired a lot and Weta now is nothing like Weta back when Peter Jackson was this virtually unknown independent director of gory horror movies from New Zealand, but he's still got the same team, and that's why they joke (around the beginning of the second bonus DVD in the FotR Extended DVD edition) about LotR being the biggest small-budget film ever made.
Basically color grading (in LotR) was the final digital color correction of the film, and was responsible for much of the films' palette (Blue-grays of Moria, Greens of the shire etc). Since the grading was done AFTER the final composite was rendered, it is noticable when they tried to do extreme shifts in color. FWIW, I think most of the matte work was pretty seamless (certain shots where focrced perspecive wasn't feasible, shots with actors superimposed on models).
(From IMDb) "About 3,100 shots (78% of the Super 35 film) were color graded at Colorfront in Wellington, NZ using 5D Colossus software after being scanned by an Imagica XE scanner full 2K resolution (2048*1536). The color-graded shots were then recorded on Kodak 5242 intermediate film . . "
wtf?