Oscar-winning creative director Richard Taylor talks about creating weapons, armour and unique planets for movies like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and King Kong
Can you take us through the scope of what you and Weta Workshop did for The Hobbit: The Desolationof SmaugIJ
Our push on this film was fairly significant. Obviously, in the first film, there was a need for a large amount of exposition around developing the characters and so on. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug ramps up to a whole new level, and that has required a significant amount of manufacturing. We have armour, weapons, creatures, prosthetics, and all the stuff that we normally do for the film. Specifically, we’ve got the new Elves arriving. We’ve got Tauriel; we’ve got the King of the Elves, played by lee Pace, which is exciting; and the Wood-elves, whom we see in Mirkwood Forest, which is really exciting for us, because that’s a race of characters that we love working on. We’ll see the battle down the riverbanks with the Dwarves in barrels, and all of the Orc scouts, as we’ve called them, which means a whole pile of new and original Orc characters. After doing maybe five or six hundred Orcs on The lord of the Rings films, and then more Orcs on the first Hobbit film, trying to come up with a new species of Orcs for the second film and the huge push for the third film, has been very challenging. But I think that people will like these new Orc scouts. They’re fleet-footed, lightly armoured and mainly archery-based. They’re pretty mean buggers, so that should be good fun.
Did you change your design approach for this film, or do anything differently than you had done for the first filmIJ
Because of the long period of time between the end of The lord of the Rings project and the beginning of The Hobbit trilogy, most of our team and I had grown to accept that maybe The Hobbit wouldn’t ever come into our lives. Regardless, the technical flame still burned and we aspired to one day return to this world, so we never let up on the R&D for how we might do things in Middle-earth in the future. By the time we reached the first day, our systems and mechanisms were fairly well-refined. Having said that, we have been on The Hobbit movies for four-and-a-half years, so we’ve refined the process even further during that time.
I can’t define any specific thing that changed between the films, because we didn’t shoot one film one and then the other. It was all a jumble for us. In our view, we’re always shooting a nine-hour movie — just as we thought when we were making The lord of the Rings movies. We never thought of it as three films; we’re shooting nine hours of cinema and now we’re building an object for the fourth hour and the thirteenth minute and the eighteenth second-that sort of thing.
What is the division of labour between your design team and the digital effects teamIJ How do you collaborateIJ
It’s a wonderful pipeline. They’re literally ‘just through the wall,’ so we are in contact with them on a daily or weekly basis. Thankfully for all of us — Weta Digital, Weta Workshop and the film as a whole — the head of the textures department, Gino Acevedo, used to be one of our most senior staff members here. He made the transition over to digital during the Gollum years because they needed his assistance to achieve Gollum. Now we have the terrific asset of having someone from the practical camp sitting in the digital camp, and the line of communication benefits from that greatly.
Interestingly, there’s been a fairly significant transition around creatures over the last few years. On The lord of the Rings films, we did scannable maquettes that stood about five to six feet tall because the scanning technology was so crude at the time that you had to sculpt things on an almost one-to-one scale so that you could capture all the textures. Then you would import those into the computer.
On King Kong, we were able to sculpt things only a foot high, because the scanning technology was more advanced. Today, we don’t sculpt anything for scanning anymore. We do it all in ZBrush. Everything is digitally sculpted and then imported. What that means is that we can literally export a digital model over to the Weta Digital, who then begin their process with that model and utilise what they can from it. We build what they need to rebuild, and benefit from it. The same goes for digital files of weapons and armour. It makes for a more expedient pipeline.
Can you talk about the armour and weapons you made for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,particularly the ElvesIJ
We made a significant amount of new armour. Almost all of it, for the lead actors, went through a complex process of development and elimination, then more development and trying different things. We experimented quite comprehensively to give the director and the writers something special. It’s really interesting because people would naturally perceive that a great deal of the work can be done on body doubles. We actually scan the actors and then make molds of their bodies out of polystyrene so we have exact replicas of them in our workshop in the form of polystyrene mannequins. You can’t sculpt a hero’s prosthetics on a generic actor and hope it is going to fit on the lead actor’s face correctly. It’s the same with the armour and the costume; it is imperative that you see how the lead actor carries it, and what the actor’s attitude and essence is.
In the case of Tauriel, Thranduil and legolas, that is even more critical, because their clothing is so specific and integral to their characters. It’s a part of them. It’s like a skin. On one level you’re designing haute couture, high fashion, because it has to have that level of aesthetic appeal. It’s more about the attitude that the clothes project than it is about the actual garments themselves.
If you are robbing a person in regal clothes and trying to suggest that these garments have historical antecedents back through culture and time, they can’t look like they were just made in the moment. They have to look as though there is a history behind why this character is wearing these particular garments. We try to weave all of these aspects together and produce something that looks special and memorable to the director and specifically the writers.
Did any of the actors have specific requests for, or give input regarding, their wardrobe and gearIJ
Yes, all the actors have input, which is good. One of the lovely ways in which Peter works is that he encourages comment and thought. That’s great for us, because it means that the actors feel a part of the experience and don’t feel that it’s just a fait accompli. It means that you get to interact a lot more fully.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug will be broadcast on Sony Pix on August 17