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FX: Applause as panel starts Laura Abely (acknowledging applause): That sounds pretty promising. I hope that you guys will enjoy what we've brought with us today to show you. My name is Laura Abely. I'm from New Line Home Entertainment. I'm really excited to introduce this whole part of our presentation. We at New Line have had the incredible good fortune to work on the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. We're really excited today to bring you some amazing talent that is behind 'Lord of the Rings' and you'll be seeing some behind-the-scenes stuff that almost no-one in the world has seen before. Now at the end of the show you're going to see something that absolutely no-one has seen before, and that's a clip of 'The Return of the King' preview. FX: Much applause and shrieking Laura Abely: The rest of that preview is going to be on that DVD that comes out on August 26th. I think all of you received an envelope as you were sort of filtering in. Inside that envelope is a bunch of different catalogues and information about all of the people who are in The Lord of the Rings pavilion in the Exhibit Hall this year. Also inside the envelope is a ticket. It's a lottery ticket and it has a number on it. Don't look at it now - you don't need it now. Hold onto it and make sure you take it when you leave. At about 5 o'clock today we're going to post some numbers in our booth and every booth in the pavilion and you can come to the New Line booth actually to claim a prize. We'll be picking 30 numbers and the winners of the prize are going to get a full prize package contributed by all the members of the pavilion so there'll be great prizes from Sideshow Weta, Games Workshop, Electronic Arts, Noble Collection, Houghton-Mifflen, TheOneRing.net, Decipher and, of course, New Line Cinema. So if you are a winner you'll need to go to the booth to claim it. It doesn't have to be today - the numbers will be up all day tomorrow and whenever you get there. So now that that little business is out of the way let's get on with it. Let's get to The Two Towers and take a look at the film. Roll the clip.... FX: Screening of clips from The Two Towers FX: Applause Laura Abely: That's exactly why I love my job! We thought we'd bring a little bit of Helm's Deep with us today - that's such an amazing scene in the film - just so intense. We're gonna bring it here except no flying arrows please - I do have to go to work on Monday. FX: Applause Laura Abely: We're going to need your help out there - go ahead and roll the clip FX: Screening of Helm's Deep rain-storm scene, banging drums and orcish battle chants appearing as words on screen in border areas FX: Applause. Sala Baker walks on stage in full Uruk Hai costume and prosthetics Laura Abely: Thanks for coming Sala. Does everybody know Sala? FX:Applause Laura Abely: And now I'd like to welcome out Richard Taylor FX: More applause Richard Taylor: So last year we had the great pleasure of doing a make-up demonstration for you all of one of the orcs from the prologue. And this year I thought it'd be really great to bring out some of the costumes and armour that we made for Lord of the Rings, along with Ngila Dickson, the costuming department and all the people at Weta and I've bought some special guests. But obviously firstly Sala in some Helm's Deep Urak Hai armour. They were never armoured from the back because they'd never run away. They'd never retreat! The idea with the armour was there's a ... they'd go lightly into battle but when they actually came up against their enemy they could fight with their broad, flat sword, the stabbing motion of the shield. They even had spikes on their helmets so if they lost all their weapons they could start head-butting the enemy around the faces and the eyes. We called Helm's Deep 'Hell's Deep' and how many weeks in the rain? Twelve weeks of night shoots. Peter decided at the eleventh hour that we would have rain. Wouldn't it be great if the elves were dripping in rain? That simple decision ultimately changed a lot of our lives! These are huge foam-latex body suits. If any of you have tried to get into a wet wet-suit in the morning these guys were filming being dressed from about 4.40 in the afternoon they'd go on set at seven as nightfall came. they'd go onto set, the rain would start falling from these huge towers, and they'd be on set for another 12 hours in the rain. Then we'd have to undress them out of these wet prosthetics and eight or nine hours later put them back into it. So Helm's Deep became Hell's Deep for these guys. FX: Applause Richard Taylor: So this year I've bought some very special friends from my workshop. I'd love to introduce Jonathan Harvey, who is a senior props master responsible for the manufacturing of all of the 2000 background weapons that we made on the film. He developed the technology that we used for making the weapons so that they wouldn't break on set. What John's going to do today on stage is he's going to make a scabbarded first sword of Sam's - the swords that were given to Sam by Strider at Weathertop. He's going to use the same materials that we used for our work and then down at the New Line stand they're going to post a number that one of you people in the audience have, so that you can take home an original piece cast out of the moulds off the film. FX: Loud applause Richard Taylor: The next person I'd like to introduce is Daniel Falconer. Daniel is one of our senior designers. Daniel is going to take our beautiful elf here from general San Diego street wear to a Galadhrim Elf ready to fight the fearless Uruk Hai at the Battle of Helm's Deep. So we just need a hand with the mics. Dan can you try that? Daniel Falconer: How's that? Now you can hear me. I'm telling him (points at Sala) his number's up. This is Kayla, who has volunteered to be our elf for today. FX: Applause Daniel Falconer: Kayla does not normally wear footwear like this, I would stress to add. She's a much more stylish woman than that, but we've got her in Elven footwear which just happens to be a couple of sizes too big, but heh.... Richard Taylor: And the next person I'd like to introduce is Greg Tozer. Greg Tozer is one of our senior sculptors. Greg is also responsible for commanding the Rohan army. Greg joined me... he came to see us, he was a pretty smelly punk rocker from Dunedin. He came in with a few small scraps of designs. I said come back after a few months with a bath and a portfolio, which he did. He went on to become one of our greatest sculptors. But also he ended up commanding the Rohan army on set. He basically looked after the dressing team that every day would have to dress the elaborate armour onto the guys that played the Rohirrim soldiers. I was remembering a moment - so many wonderful moments with the actors and extra's - but in Twizel we had 250 soldiers on set - all on horseback. I was down on my knees doing up the boot laces of this good Kiwi Sheila and I said to her 'Have you been on set before?' and she said 'Well I was on set a couple of days ago but unfortunately the vet decided that my horse was too lame to ride'. And I said to her 'Oh have you borrowed another horse then?' and she said 'No, no. I caught a lift to Geraldine, 15 miles up the way, roped myself a horse, broke it in and bareback rode back to set and I arrived an hour ago'. She was ready to go on set that day. So that's the spirit! Richard Taylor: The next person I'd like to introduce is Ben Hawker. Ben's one of our special effects technicians, and also a prosthetics technician, and Ben has applied the prosthetic ears and feet to our lovely hobbit lady and he will now continue on and finish off the hobbit. So, back to you John. Do you want to tell us about how we developed the techniques and what we've been up to with these weapons? Jonathan Harvey: Basicly, what I'm doing here is just laying up the mould with the urethane to start with. It just cuts down on the air bubbles. This is probably something, as Richard said, that I've done probably two or three thousand times for Lord of the Rings. This is a urethane that's got an incredible tear strength. It's really strong, impact-resistant and it comes from a company called Aero-Polymers (?) in Australia. Richard Taylor: We always tell people it's the same material that skateboard wheels are made out of. It's the coolest way to explain to young boys what we use to make our swords. We say 'skateboard wheels' and suddenly they make the connection. So we made the flexible weapons because the hobbits, the actors, all had to ride, run and the risk that they would actually fall, even on these scabbarded weapons, and have the hilt or the crossbars of the weapon run up under their rib cages if they fell on them was a very serious problem. So we made flexible urethane scabbarded weapons that they carried by their sides whenever they were running or riding horses. The process was a God-send in the end because it was often that we'd see actors in huge charges. The front actor would trip and fall and 100 soldiers would actually flow over the top of them and it was often that it was just their protection armour and the flexibility of their weapons that actually saved them from serious injury. Jonathan Harvey: I actually have a bit of a motto which is 'I make them. They can try and break them'. Richard Taylor: We used to love challenging the actors who were adamant that they would break these things but it took quite an ordeal. Jonathan Harvey: And they gave it a good go. Richard Taylor: So Daniel, do you want to talk a little bit about designing this suit of armour and why we came to the motifs that we did. Daniel Falconer: Absolutely. For the prologue elven armour that you guys saw in the battle in Dagorlad obviously the colours were very green and gold. The shapes are very Spring-like, buds of flowers and suchlike. We figured that by the time we get to The Third Age the elves are really getting ready to leave Middle-Earth and so we thought - and this is very arty-farty - we thought 'Autumn. We were thinking maybe Autumn this season'. And so the elves of the Third Age are Autumnal. Lots of gold, reds, lots of dying leaves colours. It's a sad time for them and when they come to fight at Helm's Deep it's a passing over. I think they know when they go that they're probably not coming back. So it's a sad time for them - hence the colours! Richard Taylor: We had a hell of a job finding in Wellington... New Zealanders are a fairly stocky race of people - good hard farming stock - so we found it quite tricky to find a hundred elves in the population of only a 250,000 people city. So we ended up having to cinch all of these people into this armour that we designed to fit very slender people. Daniel Falconer: It fit me just fine - I don't know what everyone else's problem was! Richard Taylor: Dan ended up having his cameo in the elven armour. The armour is made up out of fibre-glass actually sculpted onto a body form. It's articulated. Down at the bottom of this apex it's got a little badge which represents the houses that Tolkien designed for the elven families. The leaf mail: there's 20,000 individually sewn leaves on each of the skirts. It's got a leather corset and then an articulated lower lhanes on the legs. Hand guards and they carry special gloves that allow them to draw these long seven foot bows that lob the arrows openly over Helm's Deep wall. Now our Rohan is actually a royal guard. Greg, do you want to talk a little bit about dressing these guys on a daily basis? Greg Tozer: One particular day stands out in my memory for dressing the Rohirrim. We used to quite often get up at about say two in the morning, which is you know an intersting time to be awake at any point ... Richard Taylor: .. two hours after you'd gone to bed!... Greg Tozer: Two hours after we'd gone to bed. That was all good. We used to have to drive quite a wee way to set. On one particular day that you'll see some footage of maybe later on, there was a charge from the Rohirrim, and we actually had 250 horsemen on set which, as you can imagine, wrangling those guys we had some fantastic horse workers or horsemen. Just about the entire hillside was covered with these guys just lined up. Looking back across the other way we had clouds just gathering in, coming sweeping up towards us so it was kind of a race against time. It's one thing I'll definitely always remember is just this huge, sweeping Ride of the Rohirrim just rolling down. I'm a great big fan of the books - I love the books - it almost felt completely tied up so just seeing that is one of the proudest moments. FX: Applause Richard Taylor: Whoa! The charges across the Pelennor Fields as the horsemen of Rohan are brought to lay bare to the orcs that are now charging on the great city. Daniel Falconer: He even looks like a Rohan. And he's in the movie. Where are you Greg? Greg Tozer: Well I'm one of those kind of bad guys of the Rohirrim who go down to recruit the young men and the old men and go down and pat the guys on the shoulders and tell their mothers 'Sorry. we've got to take your son'. So not exactly a good guy! Richard Taylor: So the armour is a leaf mail armour made out of larger plates than say the elves. The paldrons, the leg guards the vambraces are actually originally hand-beaten out of plate steel in the foundry by Stu Johnson, one of our armour smiths, and then a leather laminate is added on. It's stamped out using a huge clicking press and then laid onto the surface. That's used for the most hero shots but in the case of a character like this gentleman we would use a sprayed urethane where we actually just spray mass copies out of the mould and then articulate them with rivets and then strap them on. As we've said in the DVD, we've tried to make sure that we carry the culture of each of those armies through even into the little buckles. And even though this is a background actor even this little piece of leather at the very bottom of his armour has a beautiful motif of Rohirrim culture printed into it. The paldrons are made in urethane. These beautiful brooches made by the wardrobe department are cast in pewter and then plated. But in the case of the helmet - I think we actually brought along one of the hero helmets which was hand beaten by Stu Johnson and then beautifully aged - it's all acid-etched, horse tails plaited into the back and a piece of chain mail to protect the back of the neck. I really, really enjoyed making these guys and I always thought they looked quite beautiful and resplendent when they were in all their gear. Jonathan Harvey: Er, Richard. Just... the most important part of actually casting up a sword? Richard Taylor: Ah, of course. Sitting on it! Jonathan Harvey: Just applying a little bit of weight so that all the excess urethane falls out of the mould. Richard Taylor: We want to get a really thin edge, so Jon's come up with this high technology process. It means he gets to actually sit down every 10 minutes. If he's making 50 swords a day about half of the day's spent on his arse. FX: Laughter and applause Richard Taylor: A very, very clever technique! Jonathan Harvey: You're the one that pays me! Richard Taylor: They'll be writing books about that workflow one day in the future! So... Ben looks after prosthetic characters on set. He's also one of the sculptors in the workshop, one of our special effects technicians. We didn't make the costumes for the hobbits. Our own involvement for the hobbits was with the prosthetics for the scenes at Hobbiton. The costumes were made by the wardrobe department, lead by Ngilla Dickson, and they are the most beautiful costumes. I thought that they captured the spirit of this Dickens-ish world - this cottage industry world - so beautifully. The feeling that you're leaving this innocent place, leaving pastural England to journey out into the wastelands of industrial Europe. Here is a figure of a beautiful haven that our hobbits hope one day to return to. So every day the actors, as we all now know so well, would be applied into their feet, their little foam-latex prosthetics. They were actually one of the most complex things that we had to make. They seemed so simple but as we all are, modern day people are used to wearing shoes that obviously have insteps in them and protect the bottom of their feet from the rough ground. Of course Elijah and Sean, Dominic and Billy turned up and had to, day in day out, for about 15 months run around in these little foam-latex slippers that would actually protect the bottom of their feet. Ears were glued on and then they'd go off to the make-up department where Peter Owen and his team would do the facial make-up, apply the webs and then off to wardrobe where these beautiful costumes would be dressed. Ben, do you want to talk a little bit about what you're up to there? It's worth commenting on the work in just that piece of hair! Ben Hawker: This is - what? - hair lace? and some poor schmuck has to sit and tie every single piece of hair into this. Richard Taylor: (laughing) I'm sure Dominie Till (?) will be happy to be called some poor schmuck! Ben Hawker: Marjory Hamlin, Dominie Till and Tammie Lane, our prosthetics people, spent timeless hours knotting these pieces of hair, as did Peter Owen's team for the wigs. Richard Taylor: At the height of production we had ten hair knotters working full-time for three and a half years just to make the wigs that Weta made for the film, never mind all the hero wigs. In a head of hair there are hundreds of thousands of hairs. It's called ventilating and every single hair is individually knotted into the lace. Do you want to talk about the feet? Ben Hawker: Hobbit feet, like Richard was saying, are basically just foam-latex slippers. Foam latex is obviously rubber latex like you'd make condoms or swimming caps or rubber gloves or anything. You whip it up in a big blender and you bake it in an oven. The idea is you get a really light, but strong, stretchy material. The difference with hobbit feet, as we were just saying, is that they've got to be like a pair of sneakers so we mix the foam very very slightly so you end up with a sort of a hard bottom on the bottom of the foot, like a shoe. They're probably one of the simplest prosthetics that we had to apply but try telling the hobbit boys that when they gave to get them applied 365 days a year for three years. They get sticky and sweaty and stinky and the glue that you use to glue them in turns into a snot-like substance after about six or seven hours in them. Some hobbits are stickier than others. Billy Boyd is impossible to remove from feet, Elijah Wood cannot stay in feet. This is not a comment on these people, obviously. It takes about 40 minutes to apply a hobbit foot. You get your actor in in the morning. They're already in their costume. They have the ears on perhaps. You get them to stand on a little box like this young lady is doing for me here and you simply glue the foot in, one heel up at a time. You glue it around, you glue it around the edge and you basically match the paint. At the moment, what you see here is a fairly background sort of hobbit job. Obviously we can't make hobbit feet for every single person we have on the entire series and so we use generic prosthetics as we do on orcs and things as well. These are Pippin feet that I have on this lovely lady. Richard Taylor: We're running out of time, Ben. I think I'll have to cut in. We'll introduce our elf now who is fully dressed up, ready to go to war. As you can see - the effect with the longer elven fighting sword that was designed for slicing through the Uruk Hai armour. So beautiful. Well done! And with a little less elegance, but a similar level of efficiency, our royal guard. Single-handed broad sword. And of course fighting both of them there's our Uruk Hai. What Sala would like to do is throw out into the audience a few special t-shirts that we bought along. FX: lots of shrieks and screams as t-shirts are thrown out to audience Richard Taylor: Thank you guys. Now what we'd like to do is .... Laura Abely: Richard, these costumes are incredible, but I want to ask you a question about this hobbit costume over here. Richard Taylor: Well I think it probably needs a bit of inspection by experts. How about we ask one of them to come out? FX: Lots of screaming and shrieks as Dominic Monaghan walks on stage.... Continue on to page 2 of transcript

Email: ian@iansmith.co.uk