Comment by Rodeoclash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rodeoclash | Hacker News Reader

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I'm still working my way through the article but one of the things that jumped out for has been about the armour.

I was lucky enough to be an extra in the first set of Lord of the Rings movies and (at least for the chain mail) the armour they produced was "real". As in, people actually made A LOT of chainmail out of interlinked rings for the production. The way he's mentioned scale mail not correctly hanging on the body wouldn't have been an issue where chain was used in the first few movies (although I'll admit they probably made it out of a lighter material then real chain, it was still quite heavy however)

The other armour used was made from real metal (aluminium maybe?) if you were close to the camera (termed "Hero" armour) and if you were further back it was a softer sort of plastic. In particular the Helms Deep elf costumes had this plastic armour as a sort of skirt and we were constantly getting in trouble for sitting on it and bending it out of shape.

The same author did a kit review of the Gondor armor from the movies, and was (broadly) quite positive about it: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/10/collections-gondor-heavy-infan...

His observations seem to mesh closely with yours; he mentions in particular that the Gondor armour seems to have been constructed "properly", and hangs correctly (regardless of what the materials used were).

It seems that the LotR movies did a significantly better job on the armour than the RoP show has. Which is a little surprising given their enormous budget, but I guess they had different priorities (and fair enough, of course; I'd be surprised if that sort of thing is even noticed by one viewer in a hundred).

Wow. Such a unique experience.

What was the whole process like? Did you see anything on set that was amazing but didn’t make as big of an impact on screen?

Hmm, probably the level of back story they went into when training us as extras that didn't make its way to the screen somehow.

The bulk of the work I did was the night shoots at Helms Deep (actually a quarry just north of Wellington). This is where the elves + Rohan fight the Uruk Hai. When we did a bit of stunt training so we could do the background fighting, they kept telling us how powerful the elves were. How they'd had 1000's of years to practice fighting. You see this a bit with Legolas and the way he slides down the stairs on the shield but the rest of the elves are just fodder.

One small anecdote about this, if you go back to the very first media that they started releasing before the movies came out, this video: https://youtu.be/2UDTbQrOGa0?t=63

At the ~1:03 mark you can see two very quick shots, one is Legolas spinning the daggers around at Helms Deep, this made it into the movie (he also screwed this shot up about 8 times, I know this because I was in full costume as an Uruk Hai behind him fighting off a panic attack from overheating by swinging the sword around so much) and the next shot is a bunch of elves running into the spears of Uruk Hai.

When we did this shot, it took about a night of work, the original intention was that the elves would run into the ranks of Uruk Hai and just vanish. The Uruk's would be looking around themselves confused then the elves would one by one be popping up and killing the Uruk's.

Typing it out, it does seems kind of stupid but it did illustrate the original thinking they had with the elves martial abilities.

I'm guessing they didn't rivet each ring shut like for real mail, did they?

no, it was made of rings of polythene (I think) plumbing pipe, which were then split. they just twisted the ring so the split opened, linked as needed, then let the twist go. Then metal coated everything. The people doing it wore their fingerprints away over the years (literally) they were doing this

I'm not sure of the process, I know they spent years making it though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyXeHccKTDs

All the behind the scenes for the LOTR films are worth watching for wonderful details like these. It's 30+ hours, but if you're an LOTR fan, I highly recommend doing so.

Wow, I had no idea they had so much footage. I've gone through a couple of the DVD extras looking for myself but maybe I need to go through the full 30 hours, I might be buried somewhere in it.

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