Benedict Cumberbatch Brought Smaug to Life
Today we’ve got a cool featurette from David Clayton and the rest of the team at Weta Digital showing us how a combination of a motion capture performance from Benedict Cumberbatch and animators brought the dragon Smaug to life. via THR
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit… J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, being directed by Peter Jackson as three separate movies, is set in Middle-Earth 60 years before Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which Jackson and his filmmaking team brought to the big screen in a trilogy ten years ago.
The films, with screenplays by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, were shot consecutively in digital 3D using the latest cameras. The Hobbit follows the journey of Bilbo Baggins, played by Martin Freeman, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor, which was long ago conquered by the dragon Smaug.
