RocShemp

Except that you see Dwarf women in the prologue of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when they show you the city of Dale during the prologue. They're easy not to notice since it's a quick tracking shot. And they don't have beards, despite Aragon's joking comment to the contrary in TTT.

taffer

Yep. I never actually read the LOTR books so I don't know if there are any female dwarves in them, but I did play a lot of D&D when I was younger. D&D in very heavily inspired by LOTR, and female dwarves in D&D are just as ugly and hairy as the males.

Speaking of D&D, I'm surprised that after the success of Peter Jackson's LOTR that nobody ever thought of greenlighting some movies based on the Drizzt books.

I never noticed them. The whole thing with some dwarves lacking beards in The Hobbit always did bother the dwarf purist in me. Dwarves without huge beards are blasphemy. In the Drizzt books, there is one dwarf in the party who is always trying to get the human female in the party to grow a beard. He gives her these cooky potions and things to make her grow a beard.

RocShemp

They're easy to miss since the shot of them is only a few seconds long. When you first see the streets of Dale, notice the short women amidst very tall men. The really tall men are supposed to be regular humans who live in Dale and the short women are Dwarf shopkeepers. They seem to be selling some silken fabrics (which I'd never associate with Dwarves but perhaps they sold it rather than make it).

It's even weirder when the book makes a point of their beards being so long that they'd touch the ground whenever they would bow in greeting towards Bilbo or anyone else to whom they were showing genuine courtesy. But I quickly let it go as the movie went on.

Josh-da-man

Are you sure about that? I was watching it in the theater and it looked like at least one of the dwarf women had a faint, wispy beard.

Meant to check the blu-ray, but never got around to it.

RocShemp

I'll check right now. Gimme a sec.

EDIT: Well it seems that some Dwarf women have wispy mutton chops (but never full on beards) and some don't. In the first shot within the streets of Dale, you see two Dwarf women as the camera pans. I had to go frame-by-frame because the halation in the shot makes it difficult to see their wispy mutton chops. The second shot shows a closer shot of a blonde Dwarf woman (the one selling fabrics) and she has no facial hair whatsoever. As the camera pans left in this second shot, you see a brunette Dwarf woman (this one selling jewelry) and she has a very thin wispy version of Wolverine's signature mutton chops.

Xander

Trailer was awesome. Looking forward to it!

hanshotfirst1138

God I wish he'd shot this trilogy on 35mm like the last one. Fun trailer, obviously this whole thing is going to be a massive study in excess and people who dislike Jackson will find lots of pretty legitimate criticisms to throw at it, but I hate waiting a year between each one, and I think that's compliment. Flaws and all, I enjoyed the hell out of An Unexpected Journey, and I expect to do the same with the other two. I'm thinking of holding off on the BRs of LOTR to see if there's a big mega ultra 16+ disc box when both trilogies are done.

The color scheme has never bothered me all that much, it's not annoyingly washed out and bleached like some movies are. Peter Jackson isn't Douglas Sirk or anything, but I've always thought it was colorful without dipping into looking like a comic book.

Jay G.

Why? The LOTR trilogy was almost entirely scanned and finished digitally.

hanshotfirst1138

Yeah, but wasn't it shot on 35mm and then cut, color-timed, etc. in post digitally? I could be entirely wrong, I just thought it was. I thought it gave it a slightly richer and more earthy look than the fully digital 4K stuff he's doing now. Although maybe Jackson has become even more obsessed with digital effects in the interim period or the LOTR trilogy just hasn't aged as well as I remember, I haven't seen it in some time. My eyes aren't very well-trained, so it's entirely possible.

Jay G.

Yes, but I think only at 2K.

Technically, he's now shooting in 5K, since he's using RED Epics. Also, going digital is pretty much a requirement for shooting in 3D, it reduces a lot of the stability and sync issues that shooting 3D on film had.

Also, going digital allowed him to shoot in 48fps. It theoretically would've been possible to shoot on film at 48fps, but the extra cost in film would've been a deterrent.

As for the look, I'm not seeing that much of a difference in the trailers (although watching part 1 in 48fps certainly made it look different). It's possible that any differences could be more due to changes in lighting or post processing than due to being shot digitally.

hanshotfirst1138

Wasn't that standard for digital projectors at the time? It would also technically be 35mm as the source format, wouldn't it?

I didn't know there was such a thing as 5K.

Well, I hate 3-D anyway, so... . Obviously, he's the director, it's his film, I just saw the 2-D version and I thought it was fine.

Does digital have a frame rate the same way film would?? I heard nothing good about the 48 FPS version, but I had no interest in bothering with it.

Are you referring to the difference between the look of the LOTR trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy or the difference in look between the first film and the trailer for the second?

Dr. DVD

I didn't mind the changing of the dwarves' beards as much as the apparent need they felt to make some of them look like matinee idol heroes. If you look at FOTR, the dwarves shown in that all appear like Gimli (i.e. bushy beards and gruff looking). Whereas in Hobbit they vary with some looking more like 90s rock stars.

Jay G.

I think 2K digital projectors were standard, but it would've been possible to print out 4K back to film, which is what most theaters still projected back then. Also, technically, I think you would say that LOTR was "shot on film," but calling film the "source" is a bit nebulous, since the final version of the film exists originally as a DI.

There's all sorts of K's. It just refers to the horizontal resolution, whether ~2000 pixels, ~4000 pixels, or whatever. 2K and 4K are more standard, but there's also 3K, 4.5K, 5K, 6K, 8K, etc. The Epic can shoot at 5K, although for screening on a digital projector it'd have to be downconverted to 2K or 4K:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RED_Dig...c-M_and_Epic-X

I think I lot of the reaction was due to it being different that what we've been trained all our lives to expect a movie to look like in regards to motion and blur. Here's an article that discusses it:
http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/ask-a...rame-rate.html

Personally, I sought out The Hobbit in 48fps as a new experience, and while I think I was initially put off by it, I got more and more used to it as the film went on.

The difference between the LOTR trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy.

RocShemp

Well the books make a point of how the Dwarves love to groom their beards. You see that in Gimli and the few FOTR Dwarves but they had a very Viking look to them. In these new films the grooming is very flamboyant. But I guess it's to show these aren't your typical Dwarves, like those seen briefly in the prologue of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

But, although I like the characters, what bothers me is what I call the "Heartthrob" Dwarves:







I get that Fili and Kili are Thorin's nephews so they were bound to be made "pretty" the moment they chose to make Thorin a guy for the girls to swoon over. But It bugs me that the three don't look like Dwarves at all.



The rest don't bother me at all:





And I really like Bofur even though he too looks far afield from your typical Dwarf:

Josh-da-man

I think they did a good job with the Dwarves. There are thirteen of them, and the design team made them each visually distinct.

If all of the Dwarves had big bushy beards it would hide their faces and they would all look sort of silly walking around with these big fake ZZ Topp beards, and they would all sort of blend together.

I can understand why they made Thorin 'handsome' since he's the head Dwarf and viewers wouldn't sympathize with him if he was ugly. It's the same reason the Navi in Avatar were still anthropomorphic and weren't grotesque or had four arms (like other animals on the planet).

RocShemp

I get the reasoning behind the unique looks. And for the most part I like the looks they gave them.

However, I feel they made Thorin too handsome. I get they wanted him to be "relatable" but I feel they went too far into leading man territory with his look.

taffer

Yeah, the "handsome" dwarves bother me too. Dwarves are mountain-dwelling miners. They aren't going to be well groomed. Dwarves are supposed to be ugly. They're the polar opposite of elves. Elves are the beautiful nature-loving treehuggers. Dwarves are the ugly mountain-dwelling miners.

It would have been possible to make 13 dwarves visually distinct and still have them all with big beards. Dwarves take pride in their big beards. Its one of the distinctive characteristics of a dwarf. A dwarf without a big beard is like an elf without pointy ears.

Thorin, as their king, should have had the biggest, most elaborate beard of them all. A true dwarf king would. Thorin looks more like a really short man than a dwarf king.

I guess to a casual watcher of the movies this would probably seem like stupid stuff to argue, but as a person who played a ton of D&D as a kid several of these Hobbit movie dwarves are just very poorly designed and it bothers the heck out of me.

hanshotfirst1138

When did digital become prominent?

Would that mean that the negative footage, dailies, etc. are still "raw" and were never photochemically timed, cut, etc?

Doesn't there come a juncture where it's pointless though? I mean, wouldn't there come a point where you'd have squeezed ever possible bit of visual information out of the image?

Does digital have a "framerate" in the same way that film would? I assume there's some sort of physical media upon which it's captured besides a hard drive.

Like I said, I was the 2-D version at my local AMC, presumably 4K or 2K, I thought it looked fine to me.

To be fair, Tolkien doesn't exactly make them bristle with personality in the novel either.

Thorin is a fallen king too. If I remember correctly, in the book, he's rather scraggly from having lost everything, but the film gives him a very regal, slightly elegant look and feel. I think it'll actually have more impact when he becomes a bit more narrow-minded after the Battle of Five Armies in the second and third films.

Giles

is that a rhetorical question or do you really want someone to answer?

Jay G.

Here's a rough timeline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema
So it looks like around 2006 was the tipping point. I recall Lucas was keen on Revenge of the Jedi (2005) being released all digitally, but I don't think that happened.

Correct, the original negative was scanned in, and all post-processing was done digitally. I think FOTR had only a fraction done digitally at first, but they went back and did it all digitally before the Blu-ray release.

I guess it depends on what you're referring to as "the image." If it's a digital camera capturing the real world, then the limit on what image information it could capture extends down to literally the atomic level. This is why we have things like a 41MP camera phone (7728 x 5368, or near 8K).

It's a bit like asking if there's a limit on making film grain smaller. The finer the grain, the better the detail, whether you get that from better film stock or a bigger film frame (70mm vs 35mm).

If you're talking about scanning in film to digital, there may be limits. The film grain defines the limit on the detail in a film image, so you'd want a digital resolution with parity to the film grain. Some think that's 4K for 35mm film, some 6K.
http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=57063
Finally, there's the question of what the average human eye could perceive in a given image. Both image size and resolution affect this. At a certain point, at a given distance for a given image size, most people aren't going to notice an increase in resolution. But if you make the image larger, you're going to need a higher resolution. For example, 8K digital is considered what is necessary to get the level of detail 70mm film provides.

Yes, digital is still a series of still frames, exposed for a set amount of time, several times a second. The light enters the camera and hits a sensor which converts the light into an electronic signal, which is then stored onto some physical media, whether tape, hard drive, memory card, etc. More info on how digital camers work here:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com...al-camera2.htm

RocShemp

Beorn does not look how I imagined.

Dr. DVD

Looks like he escaped from the island of Dr. Moreau, or an 80s hair band.

RocShemp

I think both options are correct.

Why So Blu?

Beorn looks awesome.

RoboDad

I think he looks pretty good, but I do have to admit that in the second pic, he looks kind of like a slightly furry MacGyver: