[HN Gopher] The Nitpicks of Power, Part I: Exploding Forges
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The Nitpicks of Power, Part I: Exploding Forges
Author : xrayarx
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-01-24 09:22 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I'm still working my way through the article but one of the
| things that jumped out for has been about the armour.
|
| I was lucky enough to be an extra in the first set of Lord of the
| Rings movies and (at least for the chain mail) the armour they
| produced was "real". As in, people actually made A LOT of
| chainmail out of interlinked rings for the production. The way
| he's mentioned scale mail not correctly hanging on the body
| wouldn't have been an issue where chain was used in the first few
| movies (although I'll admit they probably made it out of a
| lighter material then real chain, it was still quite heavy
| however)
|
| The other armour used was made from real metal (aluminium maybe?)
| if you were close to the camera (termed "Hero" armour) and if you
| were further back it was a softer sort of plastic. In particular
| the Helms Deep elf costumes had this plastic armour as a sort of
| skirt and we were constantly getting in trouble for sitting on it
| and bending it out of shape.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm guessing they didn't rivet each ring shut like for real
| mail, did they?
| niccl wrote:
| no, it was made of rings of polythene (I think) plumbing
| pipe, which were then split. they just twisted the ring so
| the split opened, linked as needed, then let the twist go.
| Then metal coated everything. The people doing it wore their
| fingerprints away over the years (literally) they were doing
| this
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I'm not sure of the process, I know they spent years making
| it though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyXeHccKTDs
| driscoll42 wrote:
| All the behind the scenes for the LOTR films are worth
| watching for wonderful details like these. It's 30+ hours,
| but if you're an LOTR fan, I highly recommend doing so.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| Wow. Such a unique experience.
|
| What was the whole process like? Did you see anything on set
| that was amazing but didn't make as big of an impact on screen?
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Hmm, probably the level of back story they went into when
| training us as extras that didn't make its way to the screen
| somehow.
|
| The bulk of the work I did was the night shoots at Helms Deep
| (actually a quarry just north of Wellington). This is where
| the elves + Rohan fight the Uruk Hai. When we did a bit of
| stunt training so we could do the background fighting, they
| kept telling us how powerful the elves were. How they'd had
| 1000's of years to practice fighting. You see this a bit with
| Legolas and the way he slides down the stairs on the shield
| but the rest of the elves are just fodder.
|
| One small anecdote about this, if you go back to the very
| first media that they started releasing before the movies
| came out, this video: https://youtu.be/2UDTbQrOGa0?t=63
|
| At the ~1:03 mark you can see two very quick shots, one is
| Legolas spinning the daggers around at Helms Deep, this made
| it into the movie (he also screwed this shot up about 8
| times, I know this because I was in full costume as an Uruk
| Hai behind him fighting off a panic attack from overheating
| by swinging the sword around so much) and the next shot is a
| bunch of elves running into the spears of Uruk Hai.
|
| When we did this shot, it took about a night of work, the
| original intention was that the elves would run into the
| ranks of Uruk Hai and just _vanish_. The Uruk 's would be
| looking around themselves confused then the elves would one
| by one be popping up and killing the Uruk's.
|
| Typing it out, it does seems kind of stupid but it did
| illustrate the original thinking they had with the elves
| martial abilities.
| Animats wrote:
| That white scale "armor" in the first pictures doesn't look like
| armor at all. It looks like a gambeson, the padded layer worn
| under plate armor. Fighters might wear that when in the field but
| not in combat, and strap on the plate pieces when headed for
| trouble. Unclear if the show got that.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| As fun as the nitpickings are, Bret posted some criticisms of RoP
| to his twitter that I thought even more illuminating regarding
| the director using the storytelling medium to just lie to the
| audience. It rings true to me. All the "clever misdirection" just
| felt clumsy.
|
| https://nitter.cutelab.space/BretDevereaux/status/1617645693...
| https://nitter.cutelab.space/BretDevereaux/status/1618083297...
| Xylakant wrote:
| There's also the full article about the major things where RoP
| falls flat back from mid December
| https://acoup.blog/2022/12/16/collections-why-rings-of-power...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The lying-soundtrack thing is indeed cheap as hell.
|
| Re: the missed opportunity of soundtrack in the Star Wars
| sequel trilogy, later in that string of posts--that's,
| unfortunately, a hallmark of modern film-making. They've
| cheaped out by shoving soundtrack development to a part of the
| process that makes other things easier, but also means the
| soundtrack tends to get neglected. The Every Frame a Painting
| channel (RIP) on Youtube has a video about this that does a
| good job of covering what's gone wrong and why, and at one
| point explains not only how a particular scene in (IIRC)
| Captain America 2 could have used its soundtrack better, but
| then demonstrates that the existing soundtrack is _so very bad_
| that the scene plays obviously-better and its emotional beats
| hit harder if you _remove the music entirely_.
|
| [EDIT] LOL, whoops, I got that Cap 2 bit mixed up (it was other
| Marvel scenes where the channel demonstrated that removing the
| soundtrack often had, at worst, no effect on the quality of a
| scene)--in that one, it was actually a case of the music being
| basically OK but so little attention being paid to the overall
| effect of _all_ the audio that they slapped a prominent,
| totally pointless voice-over on it, such that in _that_ case
| the scene 's actually far better if you leave the music but cut
| out all the other sound.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs
|
| That's the video, coverage of the process-related causes of
| soundtracks being a forgettable after-thought in most modern
| "blockbusters" starts around 5:50. There are other videos on
| Youtube that go even deeper into the "how" and "why" of that,
| too.
|
| [EDIT 2] I think an especially telling line comes in one of the
| clips of the composers sitting around together, where they're
| all talking about the effects of extensive use of placeholder
| music: the guy says something like "you look at the edit
| without the music, and it's wrong"--I don't think he means
| wrong _for new music_ (which can be molded to fit the scene), I
| think he means it looks like it obviously could have been
| edited better and wasn 't _only_ because the editor got fixated
| on trying to make the edit fit the placeholder music.
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