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Director Charlotte Brändström, cinematographer Alex Disenhof, producer Ron Ames and supervising sound editor Robbie Stambler breakdown what it took to shoot Galadriel amidst the eruption of Mount Doom and the creation of Mordor for 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.'

Variety Making a Scene presented by HBO

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00:00 [explosions]
00:02 [roaring]
00:04 Whenever I get a script or a scene,
00:08 I look at perspective.
00:10 That's really important because it gives a point of view
00:13 for the audience to identify with,
00:15 and it had to become Galadriel's point of view
00:17 because she's sort of the thread
00:20 throughout the whole, every season.
00:21 I mean, she's so badass and she's our warrior,
00:25 so we had to be her.
00:27 [roaring]
00:30 Episode six ends with Galadriel's perspective,
00:33 and episode seven starts with Galadriel's perspective.
00:36 [roaring]
00:39 You almost could have cut them together
00:41 and showed them in like in one long film.
00:43 The idea was we wanted to feel like the world
00:46 was collapsing in on her at the end.
00:48 Everybody was really into it.
00:50 It was messy, grueling work.
00:52 At the end of the day, you go home and take a shower,
00:54 and it's like, oh my God, you spit out cinders.
00:57 Her breath closes out the episode.
01:01 [inhales]
01:03 You hear the wind approach, envelop you completely,
01:06 and then you hear her breath echo out over the black
01:10 before the credits roll.
01:11 [dramatic music]
01:14 Hi, my name is Alex Dissenha.
01:23 My name is Charlotte Brandstrom.
01:25 My name is Robbie Stambler.
01:26 I'm Ron Ames.
01:27 And I'm the director of "Rings of Power."
01:30 First season, I did episode six and seven.
01:32 I'm the cinematographer for episode six and seven.
01:35 I produced all of the technical departments
01:37 from camera capture to exhibition.
01:40 Supervising sound editor on "The Lord of the Rings,"
01:42 "The Rings of Power."
01:43 And this is Variety's making a scene.
01:45 My day one on this project was just crazy
01:48 because at first I was, I mean,
01:51 obviously arrived in New Zealand.
01:52 You spend two weeks in quarantine.
01:54 And when I got out of quarantine,
01:55 I was told that I was starting to shoot two weeks later.
01:58 And I say, "What about prep?"
02:00 And they said, "Well, you're gonna be prepping
02:01 a bit throughout."
02:01 - Normally you get into a project,
02:03 you have like 12 weeks of prep.
02:04 And, you know, this was just, let's go, we're doing it.
02:07 - The end of six is explosion of Mundoom
02:09 and the world's changing for the Southlanders
02:12 and also for the Orcs creating Mordor.
02:15 And seven is the aftermath.
02:16 So I was very lucky to get six and seven
02:20 because they were very, two episodes
02:22 that were very connected together.
02:24 It felt like doing actually long feature,
02:26 not like doing two episodes
02:28 because you had the beginning, the middle and the end.
02:31 So that was actually quite amazing to do.
02:33 - When I took the job for the Rings of Power,
02:37 I was not told anything about what was gonna happen
02:40 in my episodes.
02:42 I was being given the apex of season one
02:46 in terms of the content,
02:47 but I had to fly all the way to New Zealand.
02:50 It was then I found out what would happen.
02:52 And we really had to jump right into it
02:54 and start testing different things
02:55 and especially for the aftermath.
02:57 - We knew that we were coming to Mount Doom
03:00 throughout all of it.
03:01 Jason Smith and I would listen
03:03 and the creators would tell us their idea.
03:05 And then we'd go in the other room and go,
03:07 oh my God, how are we gonna do this?
03:09 So, because we knew that, you know, 9,000 visual effects,
03:15 this is like making four feature films.
03:17 It was huge.
03:18 And this was one of the key moments
03:20 that we knew we were gonna be building to.
03:22 (explosions)
03:24 - The first challenge in creating an event
03:30 that is included in nature,
03:32 this is something we know what this looks like,
03:34 or we have ideas what this look like.
03:36 So how are we going to actually physically
03:38 make this believable and not look like a cartoon?
03:42 So we went immediately to research
03:44 and we started looking at descriptions of Pompeii,
03:47 Mount St. Helens.
03:49 So we were very respectful of Tolkien's descriptions,
03:53 his drawings, the sharp peaked nature of the mountain itself.
03:57 We were also inspired by Peter Jackson's work
04:01 and what had come before.
04:02 And we knew that people have a vision of what this is.
04:06 We want it to be unique, but not tragically unique.
04:09 We wanted to actually take what everybody had done
04:12 and then make a very clear interpretation in our world.
04:15 We needed to understand that there was this key
04:19 that we had been teasing throughout season one,
04:22 this broken sword.
04:23 And by putting it in this stone and turning it,
04:27 it would essentially unlock the dams
04:30 that would then allow the water to flow underground
04:34 into these tunnels that the orcs,
04:35 throughout the season we'd seen the orcs
04:37 digging these tunnels.
04:38 We haven't known what they were for.
04:40 You know, allowing the water to flow through
04:42 under the village, hitting the magma and lava
04:45 in the mountain and causing the explosion,
04:47 which was loosely based on real science
04:49 and how it would cause something like that.
04:51 - There was no part of this that we allowed to be
04:54 not connected to true physics.
04:57 (dramatic music)
05:00 What was going to happen there
05:02 and what mechanism inside the mountain,
05:05 basically a machine that had been built
05:08 thousands of years before.
05:09 And so we designed roughly what that machine
05:12 was going to do and be.
05:14 And it was a works, a water's works,
05:16 basically a dam that had been built in
05:18 and disguised into the side of the mountain.
05:21 Looked like a small waterfall.
05:23 That literally was also based on a place that we found.
05:27 So that actually is photography of a real body of water.
05:31 And this was another part that both Jason and I
05:34 are extremely proud of, is that that work is done
05:38 between four different vendors.
05:39 So Weta Digital, ILM, Rising Sun, Method,
05:44 and even for a couple of shots, DNEG.
05:47 All the vendors work together to create
05:49 a unified vision of that event.
05:52 So we would actually have reviews
05:54 with all of those teams working together.
05:57 So everybody was like all shoulders to the wheel
05:59 to make this thing happen.
06:01 (dramatic music)
06:09 Within the dam, there's all sorts of ancient engineering
06:13 and you never really see it.
06:15 There's one shot where a stone is sort of retracting
06:19 when he puts the sword in, you can see him reacting
06:22 and you can see him acting in the moment,
06:24 listening to the mountains around him sort of reacting.
06:27 So telling that sonic story off screen
06:30 without lines to color in, it's just pure fun.
06:34 (wind blowing)
06:38 (dramatic music)
06:41 It's not like dwarf level engineering.
06:46 The dwarf stuff is very refined.
06:48 They're meant to be the most fantastical engineers
06:52 in all of Middle Earth.
06:53 We wanted it to be sort of the most technologically
06:57 advanced version of what you would hear in Middle Earth.
07:01 And then going the exact opposite
07:03 with this ancient technology that's existing
07:05 in the mountain, it was made, but it was never really ran.
07:10 And so it's a bit screechy, it's a bit dry.
07:13 (laughs)
07:14 It hasn't been oiled.
07:16 (wind blowing)
07:18 You know, if it wasn't for such deep,
07:26 thoughtful production design,
07:28 the sound can't really reach those levels.
07:32 - When the water comes through town
07:34 and bursts up through the holes in the ground,
07:36 it was important for us to establish geography.
07:40 And so we played a lot of it in big wide shots.
07:43 It was also inspired by the fact that we did it for real.
07:46 And so you could see these huge spouts of water coming up.
07:49 You know, it would have been a shame to just focus
07:51 on little closeups of the ground as it was exploding
07:55 because these things shot up in the air,
07:57 for real, a hundred feet in the air.
07:59 - You get better reactions from the actors
08:01 and the characters and the extras.
08:02 So you actually, it's easy for them to react.
08:04 Otherwise you just have to imagine
08:06 what's happening around you.
08:07 And they never get the sense of it.
08:10 And actually, we were even surprised ourselves.
08:12 They were sat at the table.
08:13 And the first time we did the water explosion,
08:16 I don't think anybody expected it to be so big,
08:19 to come up so much.
08:20 - We played a lot of it wide.
08:22 You could see the destruction of the village.
08:24 It then allowed the visual effects team to take that
08:26 and augment it to an even greater level of destruction.
08:30 - It's a spectacular thing to have in camera
08:32 and to have the extras running around and getting soaked
08:35 and our actors getting soaked.
08:37 And there's something you can't replicate
08:40 if it was pure visual effects.
08:42 (explosions)
08:44 - When the lava is shooting out of the volcano
08:52 and it's landing amongst our heroes,
08:55 almost like bombs going off,
08:57 we needed to create sort of an explosion impact sound,
09:02 but it couldn't just be your average everyday TNT
09:06 or even earth gravel sort of displacement explosion.
09:10 It needed to have a different element to it.
09:13 So what I did was I took the sound of recordings
09:18 of a wet sponge being dropped into a deep fryer,
09:25 which is an incredible dangerous thing to do.
09:27 I would never recommend anybody to do that.
09:30 (explosions)
09:32 - And it was so important that Mount Doom happened
09:48 at the moment when they were all happy.
09:50 They had won the battle.
09:51 They felt they were out of it.
09:52 They felt that they were saved.
09:54 Everything was good.
09:55 And that's why I feel like it was such a surprise
09:58 and so strong at the end of that episode,
10:01 because it was completely unexpected
10:04 when the water started spurting.
10:07 And that meant that it started there
10:09 because the pressure under the mountain
10:11 became really strong and then Mount Doom started to explode.
10:15 And then their world was basically falling apart completely.
10:18 - It was important for us to create this environment
10:22 that felt sunny, felt warm, colorful, bright,
10:26 to then make the horror of what was happening
10:29 even more shocking.
10:30 - Is in film always about contrast?
10:32 You want to destroy a beautiful world.
10:35 You want to damage something that's beautiful.
10:38 So you wanted everything to be lush and beautiful.
10:41 They were always cheering and drinking and laughing
10:44 and enjoying themselves when suddenly everything around them
10:47 started falling apart.
10:48 - The very end of the episode,
10:50 Galadriel is really overwhelmed
10:53 by everything that's happened.
10:54 She's in a state of disbelief.
10:56 And while everyone else is running away,
10:58 she's almost frozen and just watching the world crumble
11:02 right in front of her.
11:03 And we wanted to capture that by center framing her
11:07 and pushing in from a wider shot to a closer shot.
11:10 I think it's broken up in the edit.
11:11 The idea was we wanted to feel like the world
11:14 was collapsing in on her at the end.
11:16 And at the very end of the episode,
11:18 making it back to her point of view,
11:19 she's the focal point of much of the story.
11:22 - Whenever I get a script or a scene,
11:24 I look at perspective.
11:26 That's really important because it gives a point of view
11:29 for the audience to identify with.
11:31 She had to become Galadriel's point of view
11:33 because she's sort of the thread
11:35 throughout the whole, every season.
11:37 And she's so badass and she's our warrior.
11:41 So we had to be her.
11:42 - I really wanted to give the impression
11:46 that she was now in front of this huge wall of ash
11:49 that was approaching her, blocking out the sun.
11:51 That made it feel different from the sunny, bright day
11:54 that we had just had.
11:55 So it was really about scheduling the shot later in the day
11:58 when she was in shade.
12:00 And then in the color correction,
12:02 we could push that even further.
12:04 And obviously with the visual effects coming in,
12:06 we couldn't have smoke around her.
12:08 (thunder rumbling)
12:12 (explosion booms)
12:14 A huge element in the build up
12:21 to the very end of the episode
12:23 is all of this air coming at you,
12:25 this enormous dust cloud of debris.
12:27 And there's thunderstorms happening within it.
12:30 There's a little micro weather system occurring
12:32 within the debris cloud.
12:33 (thunder rumbling)
12:40 Really tapping into that high frequency,
12:43 shrieking, shrill wind sound
12:47 and feeling it get closer to you and closer to you.
12:49 (thunder rumbling)
12:52 And then ultimately Galadriel standing there.
12:56 And if you listen to the mix in that moment,
12:59 we get rid of and fade out of all of the sort of crowd,
13:04 ambient terror reacting to what's going on around.
13:08 - Over the wall!
13:09 - Theo!
13:10 - Theo!
13:11 - And even the sort of debris,
13:17 that stuff kind of goes away
13:19 and you're just left with this all enveloping,
13:22 screaming, shrieking wind that's traveling at you.
13:26 (thunder rumbling)
13:29 And then you hear her breathing
13:32 and sort of preparing for what's about to hit her.
13:37 Morfydd, when she recorded the breathing,
13:40 I'm sure that she didn't know
13:41 we were going to be featuring it in such a way.
13:44 I mean, it all came together in the mix.
13:47 - Over the wall!
13:48 - Theo!
13:49 - Theo!
13:50 (thunder rumbling)
13:54 - It's an incredible emotional through line
14:06 and it's so potent amongst the really epic music
14:11 that Bear McCreary wrote for that sequence.
14:13 - We then did key frames of art.
14:15 We looked at the color
14:16 because we knew that we had to photograph this,
14:19 that there was going to be pages and pages of dialogue
14:22 and we were going to be shooting on stage
14:24 and out on location.
14:25 How could we duplicate this?
14:26 How could we make this light work across all of that?
14:30 - It was determined that
14:31 because we wanted the environment to be so smoky,
14:34 so full of ash,
14:35 we really needed to be inside
14:37 because it's just impossible to control smoke like that
14:42 in an exterior location.
14:43 On a scale of one to 10,
14:45 the amount of smoke in the air,
14:47 this was 11.
14:49 And the only way we felt like we could do that
14:50 and also create the light that we wanted to create
14:52 was to do it inside in a controllable space.
14:55 So we had this huge old horse barn arena
14:58 that was transformed into a stage
15:00 and I created a massive soft box
15:03 all the way around the set using sky panels,
15:06 very, very, very soft ceiling.
15:08 We then also surrounded the set with muslin, white muslin,
15:12 instead of green screen or blue screen.
15:14 So there was no green screen, no blue screen at all.
15:17 And then it was weeks and weeks,
15:18 probably three or four rounds of testing
15:20 with the camera and with the ash in the lights
15:23 to get the shade of red that I wanted.
15:26 I didn't want this neon red.
15:28 I actually took a lot of inspiration
15:29 from the wildfires that were happening in California.
15:32 I had been caught in one up in Oregon a few years ago
15:36 that turned the whole sky,
15:40 the color that you really see in the show
15:42 is pretty much the same.
15:44 85 to 90% of what you see there is in camera.
15:47 It's an amazing feat from so many different departments.
15:50 - Ash blankets and papier-mâché ash on the trees
15:55 and foam and we block out the light
15:57 and that's how we did it.
15:58 It was like painstaking, but all of us working together.
16:02 And then when it came to shooting,
16:03 Galadriel opening her eye, the ash itself is paper.
16:07 It's actually a very similar to what we use for fake snow.
16:10 I think maybe they dyed it a little bit grayer
16:13 than normal white or something like that.
16:15 - When she's covered in ash,
16:17 the most difficult there was actually for the actress
16:21 is actually to open her eyes
16:22 and not getting ash into her eyes.
16:24 - Morfydd, who plays Galadriel, had to lie on the ground.
16:27 She had to close her eye.
16:28 Then they had to cover her.
16:30 She couldn't move.
16:31 We had the camera right in there.
16:33 And to create a certain,
16:34 I wanted a round reflection in her eye
16:37 so it didn't feel like a film light.
16:39 So I cut a piece of white card to be a circle
16:42 and bounce some light into it to get that reflection.
16:45 It was a great way to start the episode.
16:47 And second shot is starting the camera upside down
16:50 at Galadriel's hands and then pulling the camera back up
16:53 over her body as she's lying down
16:56 and then turning it as she wakes up.
16:59 I wanted to give it a sense of disorientation.
17:01 Her world has been turned upside down, literally.
17:04 I believe we even shot everything
17:05 at maybe 36 frames per second or 48 frames per second
17:09 to give it this ethereal feeling.
17:12 We wanted to almost feel like we weren't even sure
17:14 if this was reality anymore,
17:16 because it's so much of a jarring change
17:19 from what we just saw.
17:28 I remember asking Robbie then in LA
17:31 to really make everything very subdued
17:34 as if it's a world covered in cotton.
17:37 Silence is the loudest thing you can do in a film,
17:41 which is crazy.
17:42 You know, when you've had a big explosion,
17:44 you don't hear anything for a while.
17:46 Your ears are actually ringing.
17:48 I always love to ask filmmakers when I work with them,
17:50 like, "What's your favorite sounding movie?"
17:51 And I had a conversation with Charlotte really early on.
17:54 I mean, she had mentioned "The Hurt Locker."
17:56 And the big takeaway from that, for me,
17:59 was point of view and perspective.
18:01 So starting with Galadriel waking up
18:03 in that sort of dazed, muffled state.
18:06 You don't hear the people screaming in her.
18:08 You don't hear anything.
18:10 But over the course of the scene, as she comes to more
18:12 and her ears start to come back to life,
18:15 it's almost like the sound of reality is down the hallway
18:18 and you're slowly going down that hall,
18:20 and then the door slowly opens,
18:22 and all of a sudden you're in that world
18:24 where you're actually hearing everything properly.
18:27 Beau Borders and I created a really fun tool,
18:41 which would utilize the Atmos ceiling speakers,
18:45 where we took the sound of a multi-tap delay effect
18:49 and we would pan it into the ceiling.
18:53 And then it would kind of animate in the pan.
18:55 So if you had a sort of,
18:57 it would be like,
18:59 kind of echo out over you in this sort of dreamlike state.
19:05 And what's cool is up into episode seven,
19:08 we had used that technique a handful of times,
19:11 and it kind of became a sonic motif for dreamy
19:16 and weird, surreal, abstract moments.
19:20 (wind whooshing)
19:23 50% of it was there and real fire was there as well.
19:33 So then we added both more fire
19:35 and in front of the camera,
19:38 you see little cinders going by,
19:41 little flaming cinders,
19:42 right like literally in front with like a little fan
19:45 blowing these little hot embers across the way.
19:48 And then we add more into the background
19:50 for where the actors and everything else are.
19:52 - We would create all these layers of flame
19:55 so that in the mix,
19:56 Bo could pan it specifically
19:58 to where you're hearing it on the screen.
20:00 And then of course there's dynamic fire
20:02 of like a torch moving across the screen,
20:05 which we would then animate that pan.
20:07 (fire crackling)
20:10 Not every show I've worked on,
20:13 where every lighting source is supposed to make a sound.
20:16 It was a challenge for sure.
20:18 - It's a fantasy series,
20:19 but it's very grounded.
20:21 I feel like the characters are grounded
20:22 and we want to believe in the world,
20:24 the magic and what happens to our characters
20:27 comes from natural elements like the wind and the smoke
20:31 and the fire and the water.
20:33 Because it's not science fiction,
20:34 we don't want any lighting effects
20:36 to any things added on that way.
20:38 - It becomes very easy to say,
20:40 well, it's magic, so it's a, no, we never did that.
20:44 Not once, not ever.
20:45 It was all based on reality.
20:48 Now, we believe that the depiction of magic
20:52 or supernatural events are descriptions of science
20:57 that we don't fully understand.
20:58 It's bent physics.
21:00 So we wanted to make sure that the audience is swept
21:03 with the reality of it and that it is powerful as can be.
21:07 - It's a very technical show, even with the scale.
21:10 So I learned a lot about visual effects, special effects.
21:15 The whole collaboration, putting small pieces together.
21:19 When you do a normal show,
21:21 I mean, you do a scene in the street, on the office,
21:24 you don't need to prepare it.
21:25 For those scenes, you need to be really prepared
21:28 because it wasn't much time to shoot it, strangely enough.
21:33 And we only had time to do certain amount of shots.
21:38 So those, they all needed to be right.
21:40 - Whenever we view it with an audience
21:42 or even a small crowd,
21:43 I wasn't looking at the screen,
21:45 I was looking at people's faces.
21:46 It really is such a great pleasure to watch with others
21:51 or even afterwards when it aired,
21:55 sitting in my living room with my neighbors and friends.
21:59 It's a great joy to see them react.
22:02 - The quality of work, the detail,
22:05 the efforts of the sound department
22:07 would have been impossible without top-down support.
22:10 There are several people that were champions
22:13 of the sound department
22:14 and really understood the value that we can bring.
22:18 Work like this, it's impossible to do by yourself.
22:21 - For me, I was in high school
22:23 when "The Lord of the Rings" films came out.
22:25 They were a huge influence on why I wanted to make movies.
22:28 I remember that moment sitting in the theater thinking,
22:32 "This is what I wanna do."
22:33 (dramatic music)
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22:58 you

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