THE HOBBIT Production Diary 6

Welcome to the first vlog of 2012. We're shooting part two of The Hobbit today. I'm here in Lake Town, but I can't show you anything. I can't show you the amazing set that's over there and the incredible thing that's over there because you're not allowed to see that till 2013. But what we can show you are the continuation of our location adventures. So if you remember from our last exciting episode, we were in Hobbiton. So let's pick it up from where we left off and travel around the rest of New Zealand. We've just finished our first week on location, so it's goodbye to Hobbiton and hello to our next spot. Here is the weather. In Pew Pew today, it has, of course, been raining. Yeah, welcome to Denise Bluff's, people. We've brought the weather with us, which is great. We don't have the umbrellas in the movie, by the way, just in case you're wondering. No, the colours clash. What's kind of weird is you're on the sets in the studio and they look so real, but you come out on location, this almost looks fake because you think this can't exist. It's just weird. It's not real, it's a trick. It's a trick. It's mind games. It's a very nice environment. Some nice stuff up in there. Just going to be a bit lumpy getting stuff around and building stuff on rocks and bits and pieces, but it'll be nice. Good location. I'm just worried about the dinosaurs. So here we are at the Tūroa Ski Field on the flanks of Mount Ruapehu. This is the second oldest national park in the world. Very ancient vegetation, magnificent colours, magnificent textures, but very fragile. And hence we've gone to exceptional lengths to actually make sure the impact on the site is minimised. So it's about scaffolding, it's about elevated boardwalks to keep people off the vegetation. We built the world's biggest ramp, as far as I'm concerned, to get down to the thing. And everybody sort of walked out to the edge this morning and looked at it and sort of, you know, jaws dropped and went, wow, okay. So that's how we get onto set today. So this is my favourite location. It's beautiful, there's a mountain, there's a waterfall, there's a beautiful view across a valley there. It's one of those sort of archetypal Kiwi places that you think, God, New Zealand has such amazing landscapes. It's a bit sad when the grips are going faster than I am. Andy Serkis jumped in the icy cold stream to chase the fishers' golem about 12 years ago. Just over there. So welcome to first day on location with second unit. I've spent quite a lot of the last few weeks in a chopper because a lot of our stuff was aerial coverage. We'd take off and choose our line and choose the way that we were going to shoot it and how we were going to reveal the landscapes. So we're using the space cam on all the aerial stuff on this show. This particular rig is set up for 3D. There's a chopper behind me, isn't there? The bonuses of being on second unit is that we do a lot of locations that are too tricky or time-consuming for main unit to go to. So a lot of our locations were helicopter-only access. So we got very, very good at loading in and out of choppers. So you've got literally two units that are now crisscrossing the country, both the North and South Islands. About halfway through our location shoot, first and second units met up and it happened to be exactly halfway through the entire shoot, day 127, and we commemorated that with a hoodie, a halfway hoodie. But it's 127 days and it's two films. Now I've got a 133-day Lord of the Rings jumper which was for three films. Yes. So 133 days for three films and 127 days for two films. Yes, easily explained. How? Well, we're all 10 years older, so we're going a little slow. That's true. One of the challenges was showing PJ what we'd been up to. So every day I would then do a kind of an edit of the takes that we'd done and put them together and make some selects and then that would be sent off to Pete. We are a long way from most of the infrastructure that we know and love, so we've had to rely on satellite technology to do all of our connectivity. These are the three dishes that we're setting up today to provide internet for the crew. We're providing wireless and internet. We've also got a separate setup that's up at the director's tent that's beaming in footage from second unit that basically takes the feed that's coming in from the cameras, compresses it, sends it over the internet all the way through down to Peter's tent. So far we've probably used about six kilometres of cable on the job. I'm not sure where it's all gone, but we keep on ordering more of it. Strath Tirey, central Otago. This is a location where you can literally shoot 360 degrees every direction. Had some incredible skies, what we'd call close encounters of the third kind skies, and where our skies are a little boring because we've shot over three days, we'll probably replace them with these cool skies. I'd love to do that, get some real mood into it. One of the days of shooting on this location was actually up on the hill at something called the Rock and Pillar Range. If you just look over there, that's pretty much that distant ridgeline between those two rocks. That's what they call the Rock and Pillars, where we had to have 10 helicopters ferrying crew, cast and equipment up the mountain. This is Adam Brown's first helicopter ride. Oh my god. So excited. I'm well excited. You should be. So we're packing up at the end of our location shooting here at Strath Tirey and going to Queenstown. Beautiful Queenstown. We're just at the base of outside the Earnslow Burn, which is the most spectacular shooting location I think we've been to yet. We're shortly going to do a rendition of the Hillsborough Live with the Sound of Music, starting with Mark Gavity's over there. So he's getting into his Maria position. There he is. It's snow. I think it was a bad choice. And we've been to Paradise before, that's where we shot a few scenes of The Fellowship of the Ring mainly, back in 1999. Lothlore and Forrest, Borromeo's death. The great thing about this job, you get to see beautiful, beautiful places like this. So you don't have to feel sorry for our actors leaving home for seven and a half weeks. We're very, very well looked after. The casing on this movie has been sensational. The numbers we were doing on location were between 300 and 400. Until we got to Twizel, then we were doing 570, 580, because we had quite a few extras there as well. We cook 100 at least kilos of meat every day. One of the guys worked out that we'd been through a ton of oranges already. It's formal Friday today, so we're dressed in suit. It's one of the only ways to be able to, for the crew to know what day of the week it is. Every morning we crank out about 200, 300 coffees. We're heading off to the hills to look after a crew of about 100 people who've all been chopped up into the mountains. It being in the mountains, there's snow around, so it's cold. So obviously in formal dress, sometimes it's not practical. So as you can see here, Andrew has gone from a three-piece to a four-piece with the addition of a nice, cosy puffer jacket. Because you can't always look good, sometimes you have to be sensible. Sometimes you take for granted the scenery in the country where you live, so to come out on the road is really amazing. Good morning. Thank you. I can't believe how nice it is. We're the luckiest people in the world. Braemar's the luckiest people in the world. I think it comes into people, not even height restricted. New Zealand looking at its spectacular best and a lot of very happy actors cavorting around in front of it. Braemar Station was pretty difficult working conditions for the cast and the crew because the tussock and the ground's very uneven. This is Matagauri, a New Zealand native kind of thorn bush, which is everywhere that you ever want to walk. You can't just parade through the tussocks and the rocks and the pebbles without looking. You suddenly realise that being out of doors in Middle Earth can be a difficult business, particularly when there's a pack of forks or wags. Dancers with wags. Heavenly wags. The boy who cried wag. Aliens versus wags. I was a teenage wag. Enormous amount of running. Scene 88, I think, is actually going to be a third film. It'll be coming out between the first and the second. It's actually, for the most part, it's easier working inside a studio. But of course, you know, the studio doesn't have the incredible vistas and that's what we were there for. Eight kilometers high, it's about an outcook. Surrounded by the guys behind me. Unbelievable. Forest Bridge over the Galores River where we are shooting today. I think my favourite day on set, unquestionably, was floating down the Galores River in barrels. Finally going to put our dwarves in barrels. It actually feels like fun. I'd do it myself if I wasn't busy doing other things. Today we're swinging over the river. We've got some dwarves coming down in barrels. Yeah! That was way cool. And if they ever make that a ride at any of the Warner Brothers movie worlds... Lifetime pass, please. While we were at Polaris, our location shooting came to a pretty dramatic end because the police arrived and said they were about to issue a severe weather warning. OK, we need to shoot, please. It's raining. We need to get going. And I've never seen a crew pack up their gear so quickly. The very next day, everywhere where we were standing, where our equipment was, our cameras, our actors, the director was under floodwater. It was incredibly dramatic. The rise in the river level was like 20, 30 feet. And that's location. So that's the end of our location shooting and we are about to go into our last hundred days, what we're calling block three. And I look forward to talking to you again very, very soon. Bye.