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THE MARTIAL ARTS OF MIDDLE EARTH
(Cont'd)
TW: They were much more dangerous! Individually, Orcs are no big threat — they're sword fodder, only
dangerous en masse. A single Uruk is a force to be reckoned with.
SFI: In what way?
TW: Sheer size, strength, ferocity, armour. They were conceived as lethal instinctive fighters ... not
formally trained, but essentially born to kill.
SFI: Was there anything specific to the pre-production treatement of the Uruk-hai that makes their style
stand out from the Orcs?
TW: The Uruk-hai were super-Orcs ... really treated as a different culture, from the fighting style design
point of view.
SFI: So they had more complex maneuvers? More ferocity and strength? Greater technique? I recall Lurtz
—
the head Uruk-hai — fought Aragorn in the film. Lurtz had quite a propensity for pain.
TW: I'd say that they were capable of more complex maneuvers, although their style was actually very
direct — smash and bash, as compared to the Orcs' baboon/hyena motif of backpedalling and sneak attacks.
SFI: Given the sheer immensity of the Orc armies, many of them must have been animated as Computer Graphics
characters. Where there specific incidents where the fighting style had to be reproduced by actors in motion capture suits
before they could be realized on film in the form of CG characters?
TW: In general, the closest action to the camera is live, and the background is CGI, but it gets very
complicated. I should probably explain a bit about how mo-cap works.
SFI: Please do.
TW: Basically, a motion capture performer wears a black costume fitted with photo-reflective "markers" at
key positions. S/he performs in a special studio with a series of cameras connected to a computer system. The cameras only
record the reflective markers, so what the computer encodes resembles a moving, human shaped constellation of stars. This
3-D pattern can then be "dressed" by artists to create a digital stunt double, or multiplied to create an army or enhanced
in a variety of ways. We also used motion-captured data to "train" artificially intelligent digital warriors who moved and
fought independently, making their own decisions and fighting without any human direction.
SFI: Astounding. Given the scale of warfare we'll see in The Two Towers, perhaps we'll see the results of
these AI characters on the battlefield on King Theoden's lands. So in your mind, Tony, what was your greatest challenge in
pre-production for the film trilogy?
TW: The single greatest challenge was that, although most people seemed to think that "Fighting Styles
Design" was a cool idea, no-one had actually done it before.
SFI: Really?
TW: I had to invent how the job was done even as I was doing it ... tricky.
SFI: Is that normally the role of a Fight Choreographer?
TW: As a fight choreographer, I would generally spend a lot of time on the style design process, but the
scale and scope of that task for LotR was unusual.
SFI: So what aspect about no one ever having done Fight Style Design exclusively makes it so much of a
challenge? Was it the sheer scale of work involved beyond choreography?
TW: Partly juggling between designing the styles as models or templates, which different production
departments could modify according to their own needs, and also being very specific about key points to maintain
continuity. Also, yes, the sheer variety of styles and the requirement that each should be organic to the different races,
which meant that they needed to contrast to some degree. Each culture had its own sub-styles as well, based on different
weapon combinations and so on.
SFI: How many different styles did you develop altogether?
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