When it comes to visual effects there is no bigger playground than Middle-earth, populated with fantastical lands and creatures from the mind of iconic author J.R.R. Tolkien. Returning to again lead the digital charge to lift the veil on Sauron and his nefarious plan to Elven forge a collection of rings for world domination is Jason Smith, who received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the first season of Prime VideosThe Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Interestingly, the visual effects shot count for the eight-episode sophomore outing remained the same, which was between 6,000 and 8,000. The complexity is up a little bit at least on the creature side of things, says Smith, senior visual effects supervisor. Unfortunately, we were unable to bring back Wt FX, but had ILM focused in London and Singapore this time, DNEG and Rodeo FX. Those were the big three out of the dozen.A common creative problem on both seasons was depicting proper size and scale when the various races interacted with one another. I will tell you that scale is one of those things about this show that I love the most, states Smith. Im a puzzle guy. Scale is one of those things that everyone assumes is a solved thing, and it is in some ways, but in practice there are about 12 different solutions that are opposed to each other. Your selection of the right one determines the success or failure in ways that are astounding. Learning all of those and putting them into practice on location without motion-control has been a blast. I still do scale academy for the crew and in general, it was like a SWAT team that would go to the unit doing that type of work. They would prep and publish documents because you have to get everybody onboard with all the complexities. People dont understand right off the bat that it goes all the way down to whos playing it back and what the cameraman is following. Elements and lessons from Season 1 were leveraged wherever possible. When we started Season 1, it was like, who knows what Khazad-dm looks like at its peak, or Nmenor? notes Smith. If you expand it to all of those creative questions, Season 2 felt like we had some cache and momentum already. The number of VFX vendors essentially remained the same for the second season. According to the VFX supervisor, We had a lot of shared shots. The pipeline around succeeding and delivering the show is astounding. The team here was doing some incredible stuff with ShotGrid and all the related tools. We took what was working on Season 1 and ran with it. But there were improvements along the whole way. The number of vendors is one thing. However, with the pure number of shots that have to be in front of me all the time, the numbers catch-up with you fast. The production crew is probably bigger than people would expect because when youre tracking this amount of work and number of shots, its massive. You cant put one minute per day on every shot without going into the water. Being brought from the page to screen for the first time in the series were the Barrow-wights, which are undead creatures animated by evil spirits. Im a monster fan, so to be part of deciding what they look like on film was a dream project, Smith shares. I was fortunate enough to work with prosthetics designer Barrie Gower, and hes a maestro, a great collaborator, and loves finding the balance between practical and digital effects that work. We went back to Tolkiens writings where he wrote them with a certain mood. They dont show up and start a karate fight. The Barrow-wights slowly trick you and take you underground and have this song that they sing. The lyrics are creepy and beautiful. Also, we wanted to emphasize the fact that the Barrow-wights arent in control. The scariest thing about the Barrow-wights curse is that they could have been good people, but this evil person is pulling them out of their graves and making them do things. It came down to, Do their feet touch the ground? We landed on, no because we wanted to take away their agency. The Barrow-wights are not walking around. Theyre being pulled around. Practical performers had to be digitally augmented to achieve the desired skeletal aesthetic for the Barrow-wights. We searched out and hired performers who were capable of body manipulation such as mimes and breakdancers who able to make it look like that their body was being made to do something but not motivated by them, remarks Smith. We wanted them to feel like marionettes. We practiced with stunts pulling them out of the grave by the hips with a fork rig. As the Barrow-wights are coming up bones are cracking into place and theyre not even conscious yet. A lot of the ones that are coming out are still a pile of bones and something really bad is making it all happen. Backstories are essential when creating creatures and environments. A portion of that is private to me and not canon while what is written in the script is the real stuff, explains Smith. I find that I have to have those backstories. I need to know where these things are coming from, even the troll. The showrunners did a beautiful job of giving him an attitude, but we expanded upon that and wrote a whole backstory in our minds about who he was. It was the same for the Barrow-wights. I love the idea that the Barrow-wights are pulling you underground and hungry to trap you forever but are also aware that they shouldnt be doing this. Brought from the big to the small screen is a younger version of Shelob. Shelob is the child of a First Age spider and has Maiar status, says Smith. Thats a great example where its a spider that doesnt have a personality. They bite. We decided that she has a personality and is a jerk. When Shelob is in that fight, she is playing with Isildur. There is part that probably nobody noticed where she goes away, and a skull gets tossed out to freak him out. A lot of the stuff Shelob does she is having fun playing with her food. Thats where I find joy. Where are those little character moments that I can latch onto and say, Its not just a big spider attacking a person. There is something more to it. I had a pet trachelas called Fluffy and she would crawl up to the base of the neck. I didnt like it. I would want to peel her off and she would get mad. Trachelas have little cat claws at the ends of their legs and can hold onto you. It didnt work out between me and Fluffy for many reasons, but that moment stuck in my head. There is a moment in that fight where Shelob uses the sticky ability at the end of her leg to turn things around. Its a moment that I like that is based on Fluffy! Also, appearing is a younger Balrog, famously denied passage by Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. When I saw the original film, that moment knocked me back into my chair, recalls Smith. It was so incredibly well done, especially for the time. But forget about the time. What they pulled off in creating that character was amazing. To have an option to do something that rhymes with that is a lot of fun. However, with modern technology, its incredible what they can do now. ILM setup multiple simulations of flame, different types of smoke, and even falling ash. The smoke would billow up and you would see these vertical streamers of trailing ash. It was all done with fluid simulations and makes for an incredible opportunity because you can shadow the whole scene with that smoke. Tolkien described it specifically and poetically. He was seldomly literal when laying these things out. Tolkien wanted us to get a feeling. He wanted to play it forward with music in our brains without necessarily locking things down and making them not scary anymore. Tolkien would say it was a creature of shadow and flame. Was it made of shadow and flame? Or is it like shadow and flame? He doesnt say. There is a lot debate these days about whether parts of this creature should be real or smoke. We leaned into that and on purpose went poetic in the same way. Noting that FX-driven FX creatures are difficult to produce, Smith ads, How do you make those things drivable or a gesture or silhouette? ILM did a great job. The simulation setup was incredible. Ents get some screen time in Season 2. When you lay this season out its nuts! Smith notes. How many amazing touchstones have we had a chance to look at? Ive been thinking about Ents ever since I joined this project six years ago. Ive been taking photographs of every tree that I pass that is interesting or has a face. I had hundreds of pictures. This was the season that it came to fruition and not just a little bit. We had this old oak, Snaggleroot. Explaining how some wood is more suitable than others for Ents, Smith continues, Have you ever noticed that some trees look soft in the way that they grow? Theyll form almost organic-looking fat rolls. Other trees are rigid, vertical and linear. These old oaks that they have here in the UK are the former. If you try to move them, theyre rock hard. Then we had a beautiful Entwife, Winterbloom, which was a real honor. Entwives had never been on the screen before, so we had an opportunity to do so. Shes a cherry blossom tree. It was important that Entwives were feminine but remained purely a tree. That was part of the motivation of picking something with these beautiful blossoms on the top, he adds. Her face is a tree that I found nearby that is little bit Maggie Smith and stern as if she was going to tell Harry Potter that he was going to get demerits. It was a nice facial expression, and we designed on top of that all the nuances that make her face. We were so lucky with the voices [Ed Broadbent and Olivia Williams]. Central to the plot is the Elven forge with which Sauron crafts the rings of power. I will tell you that set was incredible, and we didnt have to do much, Smith reveals. We had to help when they were melting metal and when they were right in the middle of forging. Sometimes when the fire was super hot or someone is walking out of the fire, we had to help with those moments as well. Returning environments such as Nmenor were given an upgrade. The Eregion Siege where the real battle takes place was the big one because we did see it in Season 1 but not at the same level, says Smith. We saw glimpses of it. Now we were in situation where the fulcrum of the emotional arc of the season is taking place here. The tragedy of the Second Age. All of a sudden you have a crew of hundreds of people working in the same city asking you how much damage there is in Scene 427B. In the end, there were seven damage levels. The dwarves had built this wall around the city between seasons, and we wanted to get that put in there, states Smith. The next thing we got going was a heat map where you could go to any part of the plot in this document we put together and say, I want to go halfway through Episode 206. You could see with the heat map the areas of the city that were partially, middle, and fully destroyed. That heat map would change as you dragged the slider through the plot of the show. Special effects helped to guide the visual effects work. Our crew on the special effects side is great and are doing everything they can, but the scale of that battle was such that we were out of the corners of the frame quickly and too often, Smith states. We had to start leaning into the visual effects, though even then, every frame was chalk full of what special effects could give us. There is a big oner where we go through a lot of smoke and fires everywhere, and we added about two thirds to that. But the third that they gave us was critical because it tells us how bright fire is in that light. The troll from Season 1 is an entirely separate asset from the one that appears in Season 2. Tolkien talked about how trolls are strong, mean and dumb, observes Smith. What we did on the first season was to make one that was hungry but still strong, mean and quite dumb. It wasnt going to have a conversation with you, and I dont actually think it had lips. But we found a way to make it roar! Then on this season we wanted to push all those nobs another way. What does a troll look or act like when its a bit smarter than the average troll? But still quite strong and maybe because of being smarter, hes even meaner than most of them know how to be. Ron Perlmans physical qualities came to mind as well as Mike Ehrmantraut [Jonathan Banks] from Breaking Bad as a personality for the character. Jonathan Banks plays things in a certain way that he seems to be over but if you cross him, you better not think hes not paying attention. That became a handhold for us and all the animators. I love that character so much! Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.