Alphachimp Studio > Pop!Tech > Global Creativity > Jim Rygiel

from David Weinberger's Blog:

'Jim was the visual effects supervisor on Lord of the Rings. He's got a looong list of credits, LOTR is enough for me. "I could do Lord of the Rings on a laptop right now," he says. It would take longer — they had 6,000 CPUs on LOTR — but you could do it.

'He shows clips of the animation process. He says that he doesn't expect digital effects to replace actors, except for stunts. [Last year at PopTech, one of the Pixar guys said that they won't replace actors because acting is an art that actors do better than animators.] He shows the big elephant battle from LOTR III (I know that's not what Tolkien called 'em, so just back off), variously exposing the layers of digital effects. It is a crazy-ass piece of footage, and seeing the layers was amazing. I went back to see the movie a second time when it first came out primarily to see that scene again.

'He shows side-by-side clips of Andy Serkis and and Gollum in dramatic moments, closeups, to make the case that Serkis should have gotten a Best Actor Oscar.'

Listen to a podcast of the presentation.