The reason Lord of the Rings’ special effects have held up so well and still look so gorgeous- especially in the backgrounds and environments– is because they weren’t **trying** to be realistic.
LOTR’s special effects are stylized in a very careful, deliberate, and beautiful way.
We wanted the look of the film to have this storybook look to it. This is one of the things that Peter Jackson would impress upon the post-grader. He would literally sit there with watercolor (paintings) and say: THIS is what I want it to look like.”
Compare Alan Lee’s watercolor painting (its texture, its limited and unreal color palette, and the careful use of bright highlights in specific places that “frame” the characters/create an interesting composition)–
To the very similar look of the final film:
Because the goal wasn’t to create a perfectly realistic version of Moria. It was to create a version of Moria that looked like a watercolor painting.
And this “watercolor painting” effect isn’t just epic fantasy moments either. Even many of the non-fantastical backgrounds in Lord of the Rings don’t look “fully realistic.” They look very high-contrast and painterly, with dramatic unreal shafts of light bursting through the clouds:
And again, this is by design:
“We wanted to nudge it sideways from reality. New Zealand is a lovely country but it’s still New Zealand, still a real country….and I wanted to nudge it slightly to Middle Earth, which is an ancient world….a world of myth, and legend.”
And the watercolor storybook-inspired colors and lighting isn’t just in the environments either. It was also used in very basic dialogue scenes, to make you really feel like the entire movie was taking place in a fantasy world:
Because the stylization in Lord of the Rings is so consistent– but not to so exaggerated that it gets distracting— it creates this beautifully unreal and dreamlike tone that is completely unlike any other movies I’ve ever seen.They really do end up feeling like “watercolor fairy tales” come to life.
This is solid.
I’d also add that yes, they pushed the look of the whole film into “unreal” territory, but they also were very selective and deliberate about where they used CG versus practical effects. Or practical everything, really. In every single possible instance that something could be shot using real elements, it is. The costumes and sets and props are nearly all real, the forced perspective shots are real. As often as possible hobbit actors are just on their knees or the other actors are on appleboxes or replaced with larger/smaller actors from behind instead of being digitally shrunken down or up. The sets were largely built by hand or on location, and the only greenscreen factors in once you get to the far distance. They built the frickin chainmail by hand, even.
Which is the OTHER reason that it holds up. Your eye knowns when you’re looking at a real thing, even if your brain can’t quite articulate why.
Which is why an image like this:
Or this:
Or this:
Which are all effects shots! Feel more real than this:
Or this:
Or this:
(This is honestly the main reason why I had trouble watching MCU films for so many years. It just don’t look real, guys. I can’t think of anything but how you’re shooting this in a studio somewhere.)
Marvel and LotR are using the same tools, including set extensions, CG, color grading, all of it, but Marvel tends to use CG and greenscreen on almost every element. LotR is real in every possible way that it can be.
Marvel films are stylized and made to look unreal just like LotR – but they also largely ARE unreal. LotR is mostly real but faked, and there’s a big difference between those things.
Like this image:
The boats, the water, the cliffs, the actors are real. And the statues were real too – just small models, probably smaller than a person, shot separately in similar lighting, then comped onto this shot to look thousands of times larger than they actually are. Then the whole image is graded and blended together so that the colors are seamless, the cliff edges are extended so that you can’t see the edges, add a little digital mist in the far background there to really sell it – and boom. Feels real.
Your gut knows when something is real – which is why it holds up when you rewatch it. No matter how advanced CG gets, and it’s pretty damn advanced at this point, it’s still little pixels on a screen. But real chainmail on a real person standing in a real forest with a little CG far in the back? Two actors of roughly the same size looking like they’re two different sizes just because of where they’re sitting? It feels real because it mostly is.
It’s not just color grading and blending, it’s knowing when and where and how to use things, and then actually taking the time (and the expense) to do it right even when most people won’t be able to tell – or, in a lot of cases, even care.
(CG and greenscreen is absolutely a practical solution in the sense that scheduling issues are hell the way that Marvel shoots things. LotR had the luxury of shooting for a year straight, Marvel has to piecemeal and they don’t always know who they’ll have when, so it’s cheaper to build sets and even costumes in post than it is to build them in preproduction. But it won’t hold up as well as the 20 year old LotR films have over time.)
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This is an amazing addition!!!
Yeah the reason LOTR’s visuals have held up so well is the combination of careful stylization AND using practical effects whenever possible.
As a result, the things that look unrealistic, look unrealistic on purpose. It’s wasn’t “the visual effects artists weren’t given enough time to finish the shots” (which was actually the case for Black Panther) it was “they were deliberately and carefully trying to get that very specific storybook-illustration effect.”
The end result is that the LOTR movies feel….. “hand-drawn?” Yes all CGI effects are ultimately created by hand, by skilled artists– but in LOTR you really feel the way everything was carefully hand-painted and hand-sculpted. The unrealistic elements of LOTR just feel like the artists are choosing to show their brushstrokes.
I’ve said for a long time that the Trilogy was made at the perfect time. Late enough that there was enough CGI technology to be getting along with and to be usable and to be a real artist of medium, but early enough that they didn’t get cocky and try to overdo it (see: Star Wars Episode III).
