Lord of the Rings

Not too long ago, I watched a bunch of the behind the scenes stuff for the Lord of the Rings. If you happen to be able to, I suggest that you get your hands on a copy of the DVD's that come with behind the scene stuff. Borrow them from a friend, dig them up from your movie drawer, rent them, or even buy them. The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is awesome as a film piece, but also a great resource to learn from. It was a film of tremendous size and filled with special effects and innovations. If you have the DVD's, not only can you study the film, but also watch how they made it. Some of the things that I took notice of were miniatures, special effects, color grading, scoring, sound effects, and much more. On the DVD's they go through so many aspects of film making, giving a glimpse and idea of how an actual film is made. It's good to just know about and find out about these things so that you can adapt them to your own film. Sure, you're not creating live action, but that doesn't matter. Film is film and aspects of it, no matter what medium it was created with, do share some qualities. A stop motion animated film still needs to be graded, scored, have special effects added, it still needs a good story, as well as many other things. So I encourage you to look at this masterpiece, to study it, learn from it, and adapt it.