Peter Jackson Blogs From Set For Last Day Of 'The Hobbit' Filming
Peter Jackson has, finally, completed filming on his trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. They cast and crew thought they were done some time ago, until Jackson and Warner Bros. decided to extend the story into three movies. That meant everyone had to go back to Wellington, New Zealand this summer (well, summer in our hemisphere) to complete principal photography on The Hobbit: There And Back Again.
To celebrate the final day of principal photography, Jackson decided to live-blog the entire day on Facebook, providing some new behind the scenes images and insight into what occurred over the course of the day. See some highlights below.
The entire live blog took place on Jackson's official Facebook, which is linked right there. Here are some of the photos he posted over the course of the day.
You can read descriptions of each of those over on Jackson's Facebook. But first, here's the first blog post of the day explaining what he had to do and the purpose of the thing:
Our last day of shooting.Ever since starting these blogs, there's been something I thought I'd like to try one day (as well as answering the other 19 questions I owe you!) – blogging throughout a shoot day in real time. Try to give you all a feeling for what we deal with on an average day.Today is not exactly "average", given it's our last day of shooting, but if I don't do it today, I never will! So here goes ... I'll try to update as much as I can during the day. At least with a quick photo. Text will depend a little on how busy it gets.Right now, it's just gone 6.30am here in Wellington. I'm in bed, about to get up! I didn't get much sleep – too stressed about how we're going to get through everything we need to shoot. I kept running it over in my mind. We're shooting scenes for Film 3 today. Stuff you will see in Dec 2014, so I'm going to try and make this honest, but spoiler free.I've been lying here in pitch darkness, watching fight rehearsals over and over again. Our stunt coordinatior, Glen Boswell, worked with the actors last weekend, designing some climatic battle moments. He filmed them, and I have them on my iPad, in an application we wrote called "WingNut TV". It's a program that allows a huge amount of material to be catalog used and updated each day over the Internet. It contains all our dailies, edited films, previs, music, and much more. I'm looking at the fights, figuring out the angles I'll need to film them today. A huge amount to do, and it needs to get done. Our shoot day starts at 8.30am, and is supposed to finish at 7.30pm. I suspect we'll be working late. Whenever we work a long day, I joke with the crew that I'm just softening them up for when Jim Cameron shows up in Wellington to shoot Avatar 2 and 3. Well ... It's not really a joke.
Over the course of the day, Jackson shot with several dwarfs for the third film, worked on sound for the second film, just tons of work. You can read about it all on his site. But production is now done. Now it's non-stop post production through 2014.