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LotR RotK Premiere Today In New Zealand
donnz writes "Things are getting a little out of hand in Wellington today. For those of you who have not spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk CityLink have been wiring up webcams all over the place. Keep up with all the news and links on Stuff.co.nz. Just to show we are twice blessed, the sun is shining."
No, this is the premier for the stars... the rest of us New Zealanders will still have to wait a couple more weeks before it is released to the public.
These don't seem to be
-
Downtow Courtenay Place
- Uptown Courtenay Palace
- The red carpet (live 12noon NZ time)
Camera 1 and Camera 2
Unfortunately there aren't any cams running from *inside* the cinema as yet.If you live in NZ, you can get some visit live streaming cams from the link above.
As I understand the people of NZ were more than gracious to the film crew.
Yeah, but given that most of the film crew were New Zealanders that's not that surprising. A lot of people dont seem to realise, this is largely a New Zealand film. The production money is from New Line, and that's US, but the director (Jackson
), screenplay writers (Jackson, Walsh, Boyens), casting, film crew, locations, costume design, and even the special effects (Weta Workshops, and Weta Digital) etc. are all New Zealand based. Even a large number of the actors are New Zealand actors - the leads, are, of course, big names from overseas, but many of the minor roles, Haldir, Celeborn, Denethor, Eomer etc. are all New Zealanders.
And what's the easiest way to get a large army of orcs for battle scenes? Yes, that's right, they used the New Zealand Army!
New Zealand provided far more than the landscapes - these films are (except for the money) New Zealand films.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
not fair. why not do a world wide release all at the same time?
Because it is a New Zealand film, and Peter wants to have the first screening in his home town? Seems pretty fair to me. I remember when this decision was made - it was at the New Zealand Two Towers Premiere with Peter making a speech to the crowd (and there was a huge crowd). He got Mark Ordesky (high level New Line exec) up on the platform with him and put him on the spot with "And the Return of the King world premiere will be here in Wellington, wont it Mark". Ordesky, faced with the possibility of pissing of the 10,000 or so gathered people sheepishly said yes. After that Jackson just used that as New Line, saying on public record, that the premiere was going to be in Wellington so New Line couldn't work their way out of it.
This is a huge thing for New Zealand. Pretty much everyone I know from Wellington (even me) was involved in making the film in one way or another. The whole country collectively got behind the production of this film - they deserve a little something in return.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I would LOVE to go there some day, except I hear it's hard to get into the country sometimes.
Yeah, that 20 minute drive can be a real pain in the ass...
The only hard part is the flight to get there, after that it's pretty easy. The impressive part is that you can go from the beach, to snowcapped mountains, to a rainforest in a day. In fact, if you're a real masochist you can compete in the Speights Coast to Coast, a race from one side of the country, over the Southern Alps, to the other, and see some very impressive scenery on the way. Serious competeors complete the race without stopping. Normal people do the race as a 2 day event.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
It's interesting to note (on a site supposedly containing "News for Nerds", anyway) the preparations CityLink have made to avoid running up a massive internet traffic bill with traffic to their webcams: they're using anycast to distribute content from the server nearest the viewer (thus reducing load on NZ's less than amazingly cheap undersea cables).
They've got servers in Wellington and Auckland, plugged into both of the (CityLink-run) peering exchanges there, and they've got a box in the US advertising the same prefix (202.7.4.0/24) - so if you're in NZ, and your ISP isn't crap, you'll get the local servers: everyone else will get the box(es?) in the US.
There are more details here.
Anycast is also used for other stuff: the F (IIRC) DNS root server is anycasted for redundancy, and one of the IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanisms uses anycast to locate a nearby hop-on point to the IPv6 network.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.