This Is How They Made the Lord of the Rings Title Sequence

Special effect advisor Douglas Trumbull speaking about his “practical-first mindset” in filming:

I always try to find an organic — or analog — solution instead of the knee-jerk reaction to use computer graphics. The reason for this is: every time I try this, I get some delightful result that is, in some respects, unexpected. There are magical things that happen in nature — gravity, fluids, lighting — that one couldn’t really design using computer graphics.

I love this idea of going “al naturel” and, through that choice, finding something unexpected—contrast that with a synthetic environment like digital and it’s harder to get spontaneous effects you couldn’t have anticipated. Here’s Trumbull again:

the ‘burbling’ effect [of water washing over hot metal is] a very difficult thing to do with computer graphics because it’s in the realm of fluid dynamics which are very hard to calculate. They’re some of the most challenging elements of computer graphics to execute and you can wait days and days for some frames to render. Whereas, if you’re on a set and you have REAL hot, molten metals and super cold water interacting with this, you’re almost CERTAINLY going to get some surprising visual effect which — on camera — will look really great, particularly if it’s shot at 5000 frames a second.