In April the big news was the Internet Preview, which was available as a Quicktime movie that you could see from the official site. 1.7 million viewers downloaded this in the first 24 hours, setting a record. The countdown was exciting and the event itself was intense! As the preview came online, we tracked the excitement from the website chatroom, Barliaman’s. We also did a frame-by-frame analysis of it:

[ http://www.theonering.net/movie/preview ]

Finally we had a distinct feel for how things were developing. Discussion of the trailer consumed a lot of April. Most viewers felt very good about what they saw.

In May we started to hear about the building of the Methven set in the South Island which became Edoras.

Meanwhile filming was still going on at Helm’s Deep, somewhat behind schedule.

In June we knew that Cate Blanchett was in town. She didn’t appear in the Lothlorien scenes filmed at Paradise, but we think she was at Fernside Lodge, a beautiful property north of Wellington near Featherston. It has gardens, fountains and whatnot, and one of the film crews were there for a few days. They built a huge tree with moorings for canoes built into its root, and it was used for a scene by a lake that posed as, we guess, the Anduin.

Much of Cate’s work may have been indoors. We’d seen glimpses of elaborate wooden joinery; a lot of the indoors scenes for Lothlorien would have been filmed at the studios.

Elsewhere around Wellington, we heard reports of the scenes of The Paths of the Dead being filmed in yet another fairly ordinary park at Lyall Bay. Spies saw tents, horses, and Aragorn.

Off-set, the police ran a sting operation to catch three people accused of stealing vast quantities of props, swords and videotapes of finished footage, which they were attempting to sell on the Net. Also off-set, Peter Jackson carried the Olympic torch for the last leg of its trot through Wellington. Spy Altariel got the best picture of the director ever:

July brought the wonderful and mysterious scenes at the foot of Orthanc, which were filmed at the outdoors set in Wingate, in Wellington. Spies reported a big blue screen, ruins, and water everywhere. The saw Gandalf and his ‘raggle-taggle train,’ as Saruman called them, seated on horseback and speaking their lines up to a high camera. Bluescreen will provide the tower later, and parts of it must exist in the soundstages.

We finally found out who would write the music for the films in late July, and it was confirmed in August — Canadian Howard Shore, who’d done a lot of work with David Cronenberg.

Film schedules got a bit scatty in August, with little bitty sets springing up suddenly here and there. The Hutt River did duty for the Anduin in scenes involving the Fellowship minus Gandalf; some scenes on the slopes of Amon Hen were filmed too. The flooding of Orthanc continued, and the truly bizarre ‘Wizard Kebab’ picture hit the Net and kept everyone guessing — to this day. How it fits in the story, we still don’t know:

Then Wingate got turned into a swamp with rushes and pools and drifting smoke; Frodo and Sam were there. Covers over the bluescreens added to the gloomy appearance.

Soon after, the main players moved up to the hills above Takaka, in Golden Bay on the South Island; Sir Ian McKellen’s photos of it are the best:

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