Slashdot Mirror
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."
As I understand the people of NZ were more than gracious to the film crew. Also who can deny the lush beautiful landscapes that NZ provided. I think it's only fair they get to see the movie a few weeks before we do. On a side note, with the success of a more than excellent translation of LOTR by Jackson, anyone else hoping that one day he may do a King Arthur tale? Perhaps a Once and Future King trilogy?
Because Peter is from Wellington, and wants to spotlight Wellington on the world stage as his way of thanking NZ.
Why shouldn't some country other than America get the first viewing, for once? Seems fair to me - it was made in NZ after all.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
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.
I believe they used the linux platform as well to orchestrate the battles; in the massive melees they set up a bunch of orc and human models, defined their movement, gave them scripts and defined their objective as 'stay alive, and kill those not of your type', gave them scripts pointing to these objectives, and just *let them do their thing*.
Much of the battle at Helmsdeep, for instance, is AI program vs AI program. Awesome.
*of course, the first time they tried it, the humans broke ranks and just ran away from the orcs. What does that say?
RD
That's it. NZ has gone too far. We now be forced to liberate them.
-GWB
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.
Linux is a pretty popular platform in the industry. Maya seems to be a little slower on Linux than Windows (don't flame me: talk to Alias). And expect to find tens or hundreds of nodes of Linux-based renderfarm all over the place. All our shots for Matrix III were rendered on Athlons running RedHat.
> the first time they tried it, the humans broke ranks and just ran away from the orcs. What does that say?
Actually according to TTT extended version DVDs, the AI's in the back just started running away from the battle. The reason being that they had programmed the AIs to start running in random directions if they coudn't see an enemy AI, hoping that like this the AIs would run into an ennemy sooner or later. If your AI is at the back of a 10000 people uruquai army, then this strategy won't really work, so they changed it...
nothing to see here, move on....
STFU! I was ROTFL when I saw the NZ link on /. was totally FUBAR. I couldn't even RTFA!
Here's hoping he's right. November's been a bit of a let down. Matrix Revolutions blew chunks (but nice CGI), Cat in the Hat is outright stupid and Timeline was underwhelming. Kill Bill Vol 1, however, was very cool and I'm looking forward to Feb. 20 to see Vol 2. (Did anyone else think of Sergio Leone's work while watching Kill Bill?)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They don't use Windows because it's a lot harder to write programs and you're pretty much locked into MFC if you want to write anything reasonably complex. On Linux, you get easier access to hardware without having to worry if some of the "black boxes" in Windows are going to get fucked up by messing with certain things. I've said this before and I'll say it again: Windows is not better than Linux, nor is Linux better than Windows. If all you're doing is entering stuff into a spreadsheet and surfing the net, Windows is better. If you need to write a lot of custom applications and don't want to spend years doing it, Linux is the way to go. Different uses demand different tools, which is why Linux will probably never seriously crack the desktop market, but will be (is?) a force to be reckoned with in a lot of "middleware" applications.
Sitting in my living room about 20mins walk from the Embassy where the premiere is taking place. To be honest, I find the excitement the whole city is experiencing a little embarrassing. All four of our free-to-air television stations are doing specials tonight, the Dominion Post newspaper devotes the entire first three pages to it. I mean, really it is just a film premiere.
Nevertheless, some of the buildings around Wellington look fantastic, a few adorned with giant models from Weta. I believe the red carpet is over 400 metres long, spanning the length of Courtenay Place, one of our largest streets.
Should be interesting, but really the hype is almost unbearable.
Just letting Slashdot know not every Wellingtonian is so damn excitable!
Dwarven metal-detector only turns up bottlecaps, shattered armor of comrades.
Isildur, eldest son and heir of Elendil, was dissapointed late afternoon last Monday when his attempt to find the ring which slipped off his finger failed. "I was lookining all through the muck, between the reeds and shrubs, and I even wrestled a Gladden Gator to see if it accidentally swallowed it." The King of both Arnor and Gondor then employed his three sons to aid in the search. After much searching amongst the reeds, Elendur, eldest of Isildur's four sons, shouted in the gloom, "I have located it, father!" Unfortunately, upon putting the ring on, Elendur did not dissappear, leaving the red embarrasement on his face plain to the eye. "Must be some other ring," he grumbled. The many corpses strewn across the Gladden Fields did not help the endeavour either. "All of this cracked and broken armor is really throwing off the metal detector. It's like trying to find a needle in a bloody, corpse-strewn haystack. I can only hope my insurance covers this." When pressed for comment, Lloyd's of London only said that "Insurance for rings of power laden with the capability of invisibility is not available, not even for a king of the Numenoreans, largely because "invisible rings" are a huge source of insurance fraud." Later on in the day, the heir of Elendil was slain by an orc. "I can only hope the One Ring is not found by some scheming, hideous halfling-like creature which eminates bubbling-like noises, or else all is lost," he said in his dying words, before another arrow punctured his larynx.
"*of course, the first time they tried it, the humans broke ranks and just ran away from the orcs. What does that say?"
:-)
;-)
Sounds like that commercial was right "when the courage of men fail"...
Good thing we had Aragorn eh
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Well it's the premiere, so it is an invite only kind of deal.
Kiwis will have the first opportunity to see it when it is officially released to. Comes from being on the right side of the international date line, it's the official date for release a good 12hrs ahead of the US. Also makes for good new years celebration, the first to see in the new year and it's the middle of summer to (so big outdoor parties etc.).
Yes, but then you did just post to /. about the story, so...
Everybody knows they could have done this faster and cheaper if they were running BSD.
*ducks to avoid flames*
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
Late Thursday evening, local hobbit Ted Sandyman was only mildly surprised to see the Witch-king of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgul, riding down the road leading up and over The Hill. "Aye, sir, I was a-walkin' down the road to go do some fishin' at the Bywater Pool when up comes this surly fellow all in black," the miller's son commented. "He says to me, he says 'Where can I find Bagginsssss' in a real gruff voice, as if he's the Lord of Angmar, much like. I give him the ol' long look and says straight to his face, 'If it's Baggins you want, then go up-on The Hill. But you look mighty famished, sir, as if you didna' eat for a few centuries.' I then offers him to come over to the mill for some biscuits and the like but 'ee says he hasn't 'et anything for a few centuries 'cuz he's been dead for a few centuries. Than he went a-gallopin' up to the Hill, not even bothering to bid me a good day." Another hobbit, Millo Burrow, also saw the forsaken slave of the second dark lord stroll through the town. "It musta been noon-day when I sees him. He was a-ridin' a black horse, and so at first I thought it was old Mr. Butterbur come from Bree on an errand, but no: I look closer and, bless my hide, it's the Lord of Angmar. I shrug my shoulders and go on my way, seein' as it's no business of mine as to what an eternally damned witch king is doin' in town. Prolly buying some fine Hobbiton cheese, no doubt."
My cellphone has just started reporting that I am now located in "MiddlEarth" instead of "Wgtn CBD", you can't do anything here (Wellington obviously) today without some Lord of the Rings theme affecting it.
...by nz herald reviewer not allowed to spill the beans until after the premiere.
If Jackson says it's the best, I'm willing to take his word for it. (Until I see it for myself, and even then I'll probably agree with him, because I have done so in the past.)
I've been watching the making-of interviews and listening to the commentary tracks on the Extended Two Towers DVD With Extra Ass-Kicking And Shiny Bits. Jackson and Walsh explain their reasoning behind the "controversial" decisions (Elves at Helm's Deep, no Shelob, Faramir's initially a jerk, side trip to Osgiliath, etc). The decisions are actually all chained together. And now that I've heard the screenwriter's/director's side of the story, instead of just /. ravings, I have to admit that they probably made the right decisions.
(Okay, maybe not about the Elves showing up. I'm still on deciding that one. The lack of Shelob (leading to the trip to Osgiliath) makes more sense now.)
There's a great comment by Bernard Hill, who played Theoden. (Background: Many of the desired accents changed during the course of filming, and of course there's script rewrites and background noise and whatnot, so almost every actor had to go into a soundbooth at the end and record some overdubs of his/her previous lines.) Anyhow, Hill was recording the lines where the Elves walk into the fortress and he comes running down the stairs. As a joke on Peter Jackson, instead of "How is this possible?", he recorded:
"Who the fucking hell let you lot in the gate?"
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
No, the Saruman scenes will not be in there. You wasted your signature on a petulant protest. So stay home on opening day. That way the line will be just a bit shorter for the rest of us.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Well, they could... if BSD weren't dead already. :)
Learn to Play Go