Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a lush-looking and celebrated hit. It is getting a second season, brings many of Middle-earth’s most famous places to life, and now the creative team are peeling back the curtain to reveal how Mordor was made without complete CGI work.
Alex Disenhof, the director of photography on the sixth and seventh episodes of the streaming series, talks about this in a new interview with Newsweek. In those episodes, the land of Sauron is revealed, Mount Doom erupts – and the image of this space comes from things which have happened in the world we live in today, to the horror of those who have been within them.
“It started with a pre-visual of ‘what does it look like inside of the maelstrom of a volcanic eruption,’ And so I ended up turning to photographs of different events, specifically the California wildfires in 2018 and then in Portland I was actually very close to a wildfire in 2020. I had photos of the atmosphere that we were in, and it’s a very eerie and otherworldly, red, orange, yellow kind of mixture in the air.”
From there, they wrapped the set with huge cloth and dressed things with an ash. Afterwards, LED lights were programmed to get the proper color to beam in and, while some things can change at the end, apparently, what viewers have seen is close to original.
“What you see on screen, the colour [on set] is almost exactly what you saw, the structures, the atmosphere, all that is mostly in camera, things that we couldn’t accomplish in camera usually came down to health and safety— the embers floating through the air, the high winds that you see whipping through certain areas of frame.”
The final episode of the first season premieres Friday. The show cost $200 million just to secure the rights, and at the time, such a commitment before anything else was described by many entertainment industry figures as insane.
It appears to have worked, though, as the show has been praised – while some of the other pitches including a Marvel-style approach by Netflix and a basic remake of the story as told in the films put into being by Peter Jackson weren’t exactly well-received by the target audience. Fans are also thankful the show features no gratuitous nudity, and its showrunners have been addressing criticisms head-on.