When a new epic fantasy movie or series is set to debut, be it a Lord of the Rings adaptation or not, one of the main concerns of the fanbase is whether the CGI will be effective, acceptable, or downright bad. In a story with hobbits, dragons, gorgeous scenarios, and imaginative action sequences, CGI plays an important part in bringing it to life – and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay are fully aware of it.
As the first trailer that debuted during Super Bowl revealed, there will be no shortage of special effects on our screens as we finally sit down to press play on Season 1 of the upcoming Prime Video series. The one-minute teaser opens with an ambitious and gorgeous-looking location that is probably the kingdom of Númenor. And the ambition hardly stops there: we see a massive waterfall, Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) struggling not to fall down a frozen mountain, a monstrous creature, and a fire of epic proportions – all of which obviously required extensive use of CGI.
During a time in which audiences aren’t responding well to excessive use of green and blue screens, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power had to find a way not to overdo it in a story that explicitly requires huge amounts of computer-generated imagery. The solution was replicating a strategy that Peter Jackson used while filming the first trilogy back in the early aughts: making the special effects a combination of CGI, practical effects, models, and, most importantly, camera tricks.
This shouldn’t be a problem for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s eight initial episodes, which reportedly cost close to half a billion dollars to produce. So money wasn’t an issue to making it look good. In an interview with Vanity Fair, however, McKay revealed that the trickiest special effects are the ones we almost never pay attention to:
“Do you want to know what the single most complicated scene that you’ve written in season one is? It’s a scene in which the elf and the dwarf walk down a hallway together. You have to shoot everything twice. It ends up being like an SAT problem where a hobbit and a dwarf and a man and an elf each leave a train station traveling at X miles per hour. Who is going to get to Mount Doom first? So it will be down to the millimeter, mimicking the exact same moves, and then the two things get spliced together and create this effect of one person being taller and smaller. We have a group of actual wizards that work on the show and they came up with a huge bag of tricks in which we are constantly able to keep the audience guessing.”
The duo of showrunners also revealed that, despite their love for real-world locations and practical effects, there are some scenes that simply can’t be put together without heavy use of CGI: Khazad-dûm, the underground dwarf realm, had to be built on a soundstage because spelunking hundreds of crew members to a location under a mountain in New Zealand (which was the original idea) is far more dangerous and expensive than creating a soundstage from scratch.
Whether McKay and Payne’s idea of mixing all sorts of effects paid off, we already got a positive glimpse at the teaser trailer. But, of course, we’ll only get a full perspective of how everything worked out when Prime Video premieres Season 1 of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in September 2. Check out the teaser trailer below: