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."
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.
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.
Strange women lyin' in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a movie trilogy!
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
> 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....
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!
"*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
Also who can deny the lush beautiful landscapes that NZ provided. Seriously. A friend of mine spent 6 months in Antarctica at a US research base (he only had an internet connection when a communications satellite was overhead... I think 8 hours a day or something) and then spent 6 months in NZ just traveling around... his photos were amazing, and I half expected to see Gandolf riding a horse in the distance. I would LOVE to go there some day, except I hear it's hard to get into the country sometimes.
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
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.
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
I didn't realize the New Zealand Army was made up of orcs. No wonder they have never been defeated. Any opponents must be terrified. People just aren't used to fighting orcs.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
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.