DIGITAL DREAMS:
P roducer/VFX Producer Ron Ames saw his role on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as “bridging the gap between story and technique.” It was the task of his team to understand what the showrunners wanted to see on the screen and facilitate that. “I’m proud that we were able to create eight hours of feature- quality material and stay true to the Tolkien ideal. What we discussed in the writers’ room three years ago, and what’s now on the screen, is part of a process that started there and ends here, and it’s all one unique cohesion of storytelling.” VFX Supervisor Jason Smith praises Ames as a collaborator. “He can untie the spaghetti and make neat little piles and put them on the calendar. My job becomes showing up and being pointed in the correct directions,” he says, giving an example of being ferried from a conversation with creature designers to one with the lighting crew about a window shadow that has to match digital extensions. Smith’s priority on his first day was to visually color-code different realms in line with the work being undertaken by all the other teams. That sometimes meant taking the natural colors of a real landscape and tuning them up or down to meet those tonal needs. “The Southlanders are fighting to survive in a land that’s an arid, rocky landscape—they have wrung the life out of it,” Smith explains. “Even though it’s filmed in New Zealand in a beautiful green countryside, we’ve shot it and lit it, we’ve added visual effects and color, we’ve pulled that into a world that’s a little bit more brown and gray. The greens are there, but they’re not allowed to cheer us up too much.”
REVOLUTIONARY VFX
VFX Supervisor Jason Smith on serving the story through visual flights of fancy
“Tolkien really did lay out a groundwork for modern fantasy. He was insanely visual and left breadcrumbs for us to follow.”
The VFX team could have had all the expensive toys they wanted, but were careful to exercise judgment over the use of computer graphics. “Nowadays, everything is possible. The question needs to become, ‘Is that serving the story? Is it worthy of time and money?’” says Smith. One of the many new and exciting creatures in the show are the wolves, as seen in Episode 5. Smith describes the process for creating these VFX characters: “We went back to the way that Tolkien did things. He drew a lot from mythology, but he would also draw a lot from the real world.”
Tolkien was extremely visual as a writer, but he was also a skilled illustrator. Smith was particularly excited by his description of the Balrog, creatures he describes as being “a creation of shadow and flame.” He continues, “There’s an amazing creativity there, and we dug into all of that.” It may sound funny to talk about “realism” as the bedrock for the creation of fantasy; however, we have to be able to suspend disbelief to be transported into a vision. “Tolkien really did lay out a groundwork for modern fantasy. He was insanely visual and left breadcrumbs for us to follow,” says Smith.
— Jason Smith, VFX Supervisor
Above: An Elven legend tells of a battle between an Elven warrior and a Balrog that takes place on the peaks of the Misty Mountains.
Above Left: The VFX team muted New Zealand’s natural green countryside by adding browns and grays to depict the arid realm of the Southlands. Bottom Left: The VFX team followed Tolkien’s lead in drawing from both mythology and the real world to create the wolves that attack the Harfoots.
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