Peter Jackson's “The Hobbit” hot video blog released (video)

 June 7, 2012 - 18:17 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - While there may be the odd gripe about Peter Jackson's decision to film The Hobbit as two movies, when the book itself is hardly an epic, there's something satisfying in the knowledge that the director's return to Middle Earth will journey into every troll's lair and goblin's cave imagined by JRR Tolkien in his 1937 novel. Jackson's latest video blog goes behind the scenes at the giant Stone Street complex in Wellington, New Zealand, to show us just how deep his team are delving in an effort to realise the Lord of the Rings prequel on the big screen, The Guardian reported.

Along the way, we're given a crash course in trailer living from the likes of James Nesbitt, Stephen Hunter and Luke Evans, who play Bofur, Bombur and Bard the bowman respectively, and there's even a glimpse of Billy Connolly, aka dwarf king Dain. Jackson himself introduces the film, shot by a mysterious cameraman revealed only at the end as a returning Lord of the Rings alumnus.

We don't get many hints about the content of the movies, but the presence of Evans and Connolly on set perhaps indicates that the film crew are now shooting material for the second film, There and Back Again. We also get a glimpse of the scene in which Bilbo and the dwarves escape down the river to Lake Town in elven barrels: the finale of the first movie, perhaps?

But for Jackson, it hasn't been the perfect warmup to December's release of An Unexpected Journey. A screening of footage in 48 frames per second met with mixed reactions at the annual CinemaCon event in Las Vegas in April, with some comparing it to the look of a TV movie.

With just under five months to go until the first film premieres at Wellington's Embassy Theatre on 28 November, two weeks ahead of the worldwide release, the new vlog should help rekindle excitement among fans. At the very least, the scale of the production is remarkable: each location is drawn and fully modelled before being realised as a live set, and each costume and set of prosthetics has to be created for both the relevant actor and (in the case of the dwarves and hobbits) their small-scale double.

The Hobbit may have been a mere whippersnapper of no more than a few hundred pages, but its big screen cousin is clearly an ogre of a project.