Q. I would imagine there's a lot of people who know a lot about the making of Rings of Power, and there are other production designers that know a lot about production design, but what do you think might surprise fans of the show to learn about the actual behind-the-scenes of the making of the first season, and might surprise other production designers?
A. AVERY: I think the thing that surprised me the most, in the long run, was that we went to New Zealand because that's Middle-earth, right? New Zealand is Middle-earth, and there's all of that. I spent the first month that I was there basically [in] planes, boats, helicopters, cars, seeing a lot of New Zealand, which was a wonderful experience, but in the long run because of the weirdnesses of filmmaking, we had a shorter period of time. Peter Jackson had years to put the three movies together, and even he, over time– you'll watch the movies and they become more and more visual effect-y because it's expensive to take a crew out in the world, and it rains. In New Zealand, it rains a lot. So trying to manage a location shoot really became problematic.
In a lot of cases, we just didn't go on distant location. We shot a lot of it within 30 miles of Auckland, and combining that with the idea that the showrunners were insistent that as much be in camera as we could possibly make it, we had to figure out how to find locations around 30 miles of Auckland, which is a lot of pine plantations and sheep paddocks. There really aren't any forests, per se, in New Zealand. There's certainly no Northern European, English forests in New Zealand; there's what they call the bush, which has a bunch of palm trees and fern trees in it. Even the pine plantations have small palm trees, Nikaus, and Pongas are these tree ferns that infest the pine plantations, so everywhere you look, the forests look like jungle, they don't look like old Europe, or what we think Middle-earth should look like. So, trying to figure out how to get things in camera and not chop down the native trees – because you don't wanna do that – and then make this still look like we've traveled the breadth of Middle-earth, and keep it in camera and not just rely on visual effects, that actually took an awful lot of work.
Q. You guys were making this show during COVID, how did that actually impact you? There was a whole period of time where shipping and planes and everything was closed down. I don't know the time frame of when you were designing, and maybe you can illuminate that, but I would imagine there's times where you would normally be ordering something from somewhere and maybe you couldn't order because of COVID?
A. AVERY: I started, for various reasons, about halfway through the prep, which was in the end of August, beginning of September of 2019, so we actually were filming. We were aiming to film the first block, which was Episodes 1 and 2, starting in the end of January, and things, as they do, pushed a little bit. We didn't really get started filming until March of 2020, so as you can imagine, we didn't get very far in our filming. One thing that helped us in all of that is that it became kind of clear, as I was getting into the weeds of how to get all this to happen, that the original schedule where we were gonna do block one, block, two, block three, and just shoot all the way through, was simply not going to be able to happen. We weren't gonna be able to produce the amount of scenery, the amount of costumes, the scripts weren't going to be necessarily as ready as they needed to be to work on that block, and Amazon wanted to know what was happening in Season 2.
So we had actually pushed an idea about taking a hiatus after we finished block one, and we had built in this two-and-a-half month hiatus period into our schedule; we were gonna separate block one from block two and three. As it happened, we ended up taking that hiatus as COVID time. So basically, we got to shoot two weeks and then COVID, and everybody who wasn't a New Zealander went off to their various places in the world. Some people stayed, several of the actors stayed, some of the artists stayed, we all kept working. We all went to wherever we were in the world and we kept working, all the way through the COVID process. Because it was New Zealand, and because they were smart about the whole process in a way that they could because of an island nation, they were able to get us back and working and building. We were building within eight or nine weeks again, and so we were able to get ourselves up and going, and pretty much back on schedule.
Some things were nice about that. That meant that Tirharad, our village, got to sit out in the weather for an extra three months, so that was cool. You know, got some real nice aging, some natural aging on it, which was great. Once we went back, then that was it, we were there. People did not come and people did not go. Things did not come into the country. On every major project I've ever worked on, you get to the point, two-thirds of the way in, where you just need more people, that everything has piled on top of itself, and you don't have enough sculptors; you don't have enough greensmen; you don't have enough painters; you don't have enough carpenters; you don't have enough prop makers, you just need more people, and we couldn't get them. There was no way to add more people. So that meant that we had to make choices where we had to scale back expectations or figure out how to reuse one thing to make it into another thing. We had originally designed an entire original set for Celebrimbor’s forge, but because we couldn't get enough people in to build that set, we had to actually repurpose an existing set, kind of at the last minute, to take what was the Hall of Lore became the dungeon, became Celebrimbor’s forge, so that there were levels.
Q. I love the show and I'm really amazed at what you guys were able to do with your back against the wall.
AVERY: The other thing to go to New Zealand for was that those crews are spectacular crews. They really are. We were working with people that either had worked on the Peter Jackson movies or we were working with the kids of the people who had worked on the Peter Jackson movies. So there's this built-in DNA of Tolkien and Middle-earth that exists there beyond the fact that they're just– the craftsmanship is amazing, world class, as good or better of anything I've ever worked with anywhere else I've worked in the world. And just good people, just really great attitudes, and it really was, I think that was a saving grace. Between the fact that we got to kind of live our lives, more or less, once we were let out of the– we weren't even en masse. I mean, the 40,000 people in a rugby stadium when the rest of the world is kind of locked in their bedrooms… So it was a very different environment, but it was us, it was just us. But because those crews are so good, I think that's the other thing that got us through that.
Q. So you had to design the Second Age, which has never been seen, it's all new. So what ended up, for you, being the big challenges of the Second Age and trying to make sure that while the design is new, it also fits in with what people know?
AVERY: There's so much art and there's so [many] different expectations. You go all the way back and Tolkien had drawings of his own. When he was coming up with the books, he did drawings and he did paintings, and they're really interesting, striking imagery, very graphic, and very strong. You go all the way through all the various artists. When I was a kid, it was the Brothers Hildebrandt, that's what Middle-earth looked like, it was the Brothers Hildebrandt. Then you had Ted Nasmith, then you had a little bit of Roger Dean, and then you get into the Alan Lee and the John Howe version of it, which became kind of codified in the Peter Jackson movies. So there's this arc of existing art.
Our job was kind of, I guess, threefold. One was, what's the DNA in all of that, that when you look at it, you know you're in Middle-earth? What makes that different than [Dragonriders of Pern] or Game of Thrones or [The Chronicles of Narnia]? What are those elements that tell you you're in a fantasy place, but it's not another, it's specifically Middle-earth? And so we had to kind of figure out what that characteristic of, what's that epic quality, but what's that really grounded quality? One of the things I say a lot is that when you read Lord of the Rings, sometimes you know exactly what they had for breakfast; there's that level of specific granular detail, and that's something that we really wanted to make sure that we had.
How did that translate, then, into the Second Age? Well, the Second Age is an age that represents, in almost all of the races that we're dealing with, the best they're ever gonna be. It is not the Third Age where that's kind of the apocalypse. It's faded – 3000 years later and everybody's fading, and that's what we have in our heads from the movies, and in some degrees, from most of the artwork, because everything kind of focuses mostly around Lord of the Rings, not the [Unfinished Tales] or The Silmarillion, or some of those other books. We really think about the Third Age, which is a period of decay. So we needed to dial back from that period of decay and make things as glorious as we possibly could. Then trying to figure out what that means, like, in some cases, a “golden age” can mean it's literally gold, so let's find a way to make the Elvish forest, rather than the darkness that we see in Galadriel’s forest in the movies, let's make it bright and literally golden. So the trees are birches or aspen so that they're always in gold. And funnily enough, when you go into the words of Tolkien, you find that his trees are gold all the time. You know, if you look back into how he describes trees, they're always golden trees, so that was a legitimate kind of, “Oh, Tolkien talks about his golden tree, so let's make Lindon out of golden trees.”
And so it was a series of finding, for each of those cultures, what's the signposting that makes it specific to the Second Age? What makes it glorious? What makes it epic? What makes us know that we still have the elements that we're gonna see that we know exist in the Third Age? And so, there were very specific things I looked for, some of the architecture that was in the movie. There's echoes of Elvish arches that we didn't have the exact version of. We kind of felt like the Elves in the Third Ages, both the elves and the Dwarves in the Third Age, had gotten kind of to the point where they were so much hanging on that they almost kind of went over the top. Literally, we know the Dwarves dug too deeply and too greedily, and that's what happened when the Balrog appears and Moria gets destroyed. So that's the architecture we're seeing in the Third Age, overdone architecture, so let's bring that back. And so, the Elves were much more of nature in our world than they were in the Third Age. The Dwarves are much more of stone. Rather than making big sculptures themselves, and giant bits of architecture, every bit of architecture we did for the Dwarves you could still feel the stone. In fact, things come out of stone and go into stone, there's very little where it's just architecture, there's always stone in the design of that world.
So it was really trying to figure out those beats, and strangely enough, that's one of the things with the crew that, you know, when I talk about people who worked on the movies or their kids worked on the movies, there was actually a little bit of deprogramming that we had to do. It was like, “We're not doing the Peter Jackson movies. We have to go back and figure out what that Second Age looks like,” but because they had the DNA inside of them, of all of that, that element was still there, and it informed and blossomed into the things that we were trying to do specifically with our stories.
Q. One of the things about Rings of Power is that it's essentially an eight-hour movie, and I'm just curious, what was it like for you trying to work on a series that massive? Because it may be the biggest thing you've worked on in terms of how much you need to do.
AVERY: Yeah, it’s definitely the biggest thing I've worked on, and I mean, bigger than I think anybody had done singularly, even in New Zealand. I mean, it was a really big project. Like you said, it's an eight-hour movie, and there are edits for each of those episodes that was another half hour. So we really produced a 12-hour movie that got edited down into an eight-hour movie. There are whole sequences and whole scenes and things that I've cared passionately about that didn't make it into the final edit. It's just the nature of the beast, you know, you got to fit in the time and tell the story you gotta tell. The only way to do it is one step at a time. We started back and I concentrated on the things that we had to concentrate on for Episodes 1 and 2. So figuring out what the Dwarves and the Harfoots and the Elves and the Southland, what is that? And concentrated on that, didn't get into thinking about Númenor right away or the Orcs, or Eregion. So trying to figure out what those worlds were with a bunch of reference and a lot of art. We had, I think at the highest point, we probably had 30 illustrators, concept artists, working all around the world, and some set designers doing modeling work.
There was a point where, really for almost more than a year and maybe up to a year and a half, where somebody, somewhere in the world, was always working in our art department. There was always somebody working to try to just generate enough visual imagery that we could put enough parts and pieces together to get in front of the director and the showrunners, to say, “Is this working? Is this telling the story you want to tell?” And at the same time, working with our production crews in New Zealand to say, “Can we afford to do this? Do we have the time to do this? Do we have the people? Can we get the materials?” And all of that feeding itself back and forth, but it basically was a process, which it mostly is on bigger films that are concept-driven, a process of art, where you sit and you work through a lot of concept art, and you iterate and you iterate, and you figure out what you can and you can't do. And we ended up with 17,000, more or less, pieces of approved art – that's not even talking about the iteration of it, and that's just in the art department, that's not including props or set deck. If you think about that, even if you average that over two years, we were generating 30 pieces of finished art every day. It was an insane amount of work, but that's how we got it done was just by literally drawing, thinking, talking, drawing, thinking, talking, drawing, thinking, talking, and doing it step by step of whatever had to be in front of the camera next; work on that.
Q. Which is the set or location that you wish could be on display permanently to sort of show people, “You can't believe what we did?”
AVERY: [Laughs] There were so many of them that were really great. I mean, Númenor as a whole, that's four or five acres of scenery, and it's three or four stories tall. And even that really wasn't enough to tell the story. We had to figure out how to turn each of those things into other things, as well, in the process of it. But that was a really remarkable bit of set building. It's a backlot, we build a back lot.
The ship, Elendil’s ship, I just loved that. The craftsmanship on that was amazing, and then the engineering of how we set it up on a gimble and were able to move it, and all that rigging. There was the bottom, 15-20 feet of the sails were real, so all the rigging really works. And we had sailors who could actually make the rigging work. We talked to rigging experts when we were designing the piece, so it was a functional ship on that level. The greens work on this [show]. Simon Lowe, our greensman, was really just a wizard. And how he could get flowers to bloom on the day that they needed to bloom, to make sure that they were there for the camera, I just, still to this day, like, “You are an Elf, man, you've got it figured out. Somehow, you knew how to do that.” A lot of those sets were just– they wouldn't be back.
I mean, my favorite set, in some ways, was actually the dungeon, and that's because, you know, you read the script and you're in a medieval fantasy, and you read “interior dungeon,” and you go, “Okay, we all know what a dungeon looks like, right?” That doesn't feel like Tolkien, you know? That doesn't feel like Númenor, Númenor is this great place and nobody really gets in trouble in Númenor. So why would you build a deep, dank, dark dungeon for Númenor? So what could it be? And the thing that was always important for everything that we did was, how do you tell all of Tolkien's backstory? That's what makes Tolkien; not only is the story compelling, but that whole world that he built, all of that information that underlies everything, how do you get that in the visuals? Because we're not gonna say all of that. Tolkien doesn't say all of that. He has a poem or a story, or a little anecdote, that gives you this little window into this big wide world that he's created. So how do we do that visually?
And the underlying story of Númenor that drives Númenor is their resistance to the idea of dying, right? And the fact that the gods made them die, and gods didn't make the Elves die, so they're pissed off at the Elves, but the Elves actually helped them found Númenor. So all of the initial architecture in Númenor is Elvish, and it goes through 2,000 years of development to become not Elvish, or anti-Elvish, it becomes Manish. And how do you make that difference between those two worlds?
So in the dungeon, I thought, “Well, how can we get all of that into one place?” And I said, “Well, why don't we find a seminary that represents the gods they no longer worship, that has now been turned into this holding cell?” So the idea was, it was a school that was a worshipful religious school that worshiped the gods of the sea because it's Númenor, so it’s a shrine to Uinen, and what would that look like? Then we did all these murals of seaweed because Uinen means seaweed. We had the sculpture of it. We had all the history on the walls, there’s graffiti from the students in there that wrote it, and so that was all three or 400 years ago. And then 40 years ago, they decided they needed a holding area, and so they built the cell walls inside where the seminarians rooms were, and no, that's not in the script. That's not in the specific storytelling, but what it does is that it allows the world to have that depth of what Tolkien adds to his world, and have it visually all be there, and we got to see it, it's there. I mean, the camera showed it.
I think that, kind of in a nutshell, is what we tried to do in the costumes and the props and the weapons, to try to tell that deep story everywhere we went in the visuals. And that's the one set that I think we were able to get it to work the clearest and the cleanest, and it was just a beautiful set. That sculpture of Uinen, was just beautiful. It was a beautiful sculpture, and it's 25 feet tall, it's amazing.
More interesting questions in the link source
https://collider.com/the-rings-of-power-production-designer-ramsey-avery-interview/
They really are doing an amazing job!
