The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has quite possibly set a record for the sheer number of visual effects included in the second season of the Prime Video series — about 6,000 across eight episodes — not to mention the extraordinary amount of design variation within those shots.
While fellow outstanding special visual effects Emmy nominee House of the Dragon has lots of, well, dragons, the team behind The Rings of Power was tasked with a huge list of creatures to bring to life onscreen — orcs, ents, goblins, hill trolls, sea worms, giant spiders and eagles, a Balrog demon and a shape-shifting Sauron (Charlie Vickers), to name a few. Add in all the magic effects, battle sequences and idyllic Middle-earth landscapes, and you have a drama series whose digital wizardry is always outdoing itself in fresh ways.
“It’s a really amazing amount of variety that I honestly don’t think has ever been done at this scale,” says VFX supervisor Jason Smith. “A blockbuster two-hour movie will have 1,500 to 2,000 effects shots. And the really big shows with a lot of effects usually have an effects sequence and then will have an emotional scene in a cafeteria or something. Every scene we have, there’s some part of the world that’s being created — and hopefully a lot of ‘invisible’ effects that nobody notices.”
Adds Smith, “With 6,000 shots, it’s like a watch factory that explodes in reverse, and at the very end, everything comes together. It’s a dream project.”
The VFX veteran, whose credits include The Revenant, The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Kong: Skull Island, discusses pulling off the epic second season of the streamer’s Lord of the Rings prequel series and the challenges of staying true to J.R.R. Tolkien’s world.
What was the toughest effect to execute in season two?
Showing the Entwives (talking tree spouses) onscreen for the first time is such a huge responsibility, and there’s so many ways you could go wrong with it. We worked on the Entwife model for over a year. One of the things we did at the very beginning is I went hiking a lot and took thousands of photos of trees that had “faces.” Because if you design a face on a tree, it can look like putting a Halloween mask on a tree. We found it’s more like doing caricature work — trying to get three lines just right — which is a totally different thing than doing realism all day long. What was also incredibly complicated was a shot of Sauron in the first episode simulating millions of worms crawling all over each other and acting like muscles with blood simulated between those worms. You’d think there’s probably an easy way to do that, but there are no shortcuts for it.
According to Jason Smith, the hardest effects to pull off this season were the Entwives because the team didn’t want them to look like a “Halloween mask on a tree.”
Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
I’m sure there has to be a lot of questions around finding balance between what Tolkien described versus what looks cool to modern audiences. How do you handle those canon issues?
Well, a lot of what people are used to has already deviated from canon — from Tolkien artists through [the live-action] and animated movies. Like with Ents, Tolkien described them as having skin and looking more human. I think we all found it satisfying [in Peter Jackson’s films] when we saw them on the big screen and they looked very treelike. Sometimes Tolkien would describe something as “a creature of flame and shadow” and leave it at that, and every single human would walk away with a different idea of what [a Balrog] looks like. We have to respect everybody that came before us by not just wholesale grabbing what they did. We also want to rhyme with it so it feels familiar. And we’ll ask ourselves questions, like, who is this troll? Why is he doing this? What is he hoping for?
What’s something people assume is simple but was actually really difficult to pull off?
There are a lot of those, but scale is one of those issues that people think is a solved problem. Like they think somebody playing a dwarf must just be that height. The amount of planning for every single scale scene would blow people away. We’re kind of magicians because we’ll do the trick one way in one shot and people will think they’ve caught on to what we’re doing, but then we do it with a different method in the next shot. Also, sometimes you’re an artist and will have something looking perfectly real, and I’ll have to come and tell you, “That’s not the way people think that lava moves.” And they’re like, “But I’m right.” “I know you are, but you have to slow it down.” Sometimes we have to make it look fake so people think it’s real.
Netflix recently made headlines after using AI for VFX in its sci-fi series The Eternaut. So, of course, I have to ask you about the creeping use of AI.
I appreciate both sides of [the debate]. But the way the landscape is currently, using AI feels like you’re using the work of other artists. It’s like when you use Google to search for an image; I can’t then say, “I made that.” The tools that I’ve seen so far don’t yet give the artist enough control to own the creative, and I think that’s what copyright people are saying, too. It’s amazing what they can do, but for our show, it’s all man-made.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.