The Hobbit Fan Edit - May the wind under your wings bear y

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Here is now my updated version of the Carrock after putting my plan into action for the scene based on your feedback! This is why feedback is so important to me as it's always great to get extra eyes on the project as this can influence a better result and push me more out of my comfort zone.

In this scene you will see three extra shots where I've rotoscoped some eagles into the background, the third of which I am unsure whether to keep in or not as I feel like this is the least perfect roto out of all the shots of the eagles. Let me know what you think! The eagles were added in to further smooth the transition and to show at least some of the party being dropped off on the Carrock. The rest of the Company, like the movie itself, don't show the rest of the Company landing on the Carrock so I had to make the best with the small amount of footage I had.

For the shot of Gandalf landing on the Carrock, credit needs to be given to M4, who produced a shot where Thorin’s unconscious body is absent and is instead replaced by a rock. I used this as a base reference and then ran it through ebsynth to produce the last few frames of the shot as I wanted to use the entire shot and not cut it short. You can find M4’s fantastic edit of The Hobbit trilogy from a quick google search where you’ll find his website with more information of how to watch or get ahold of it.

I also included a shot of Thorin being lifted to his feet. I tried to play this off more for comedic effect; that the leader of the Company is overcome with what just happened with the eagles and he's a bit staggered. It was also to elongate the scene just ever so slightly. The shot of Thorin being lifted to his feet was very challenging, as I did six complete passes on ebsynth in order to make Thorin's face look less damaged, as he doesn't fight anyone during the Out of the Frying-Pan scene. This involved patching up his face with small masks from surrounding areas of his face, feathering them, saving it as a keyframe image, then letting ebsynth do its thing and applying this change to the whole shot. As always, ebsynth is imperfect, and so six complete passes had to be done and then pieced together.

The first roto on the eagles I did was for Bilbo's shot. First I rotoscoped around the eagle itself and then around Bilbo. The shot of Bilbo is taken from a separate shot of him on the Carrock, where there is no eagle behind him. The original shot of the eagle had Bilbo blocking out elements of the eagle. Essentially, I needed to fill in some of the gaps of the eagle that were blocked out in the original shot by Bilbo. In total, the eagle taking off behind Bilbo is composed of around 20 separate layers. Screenshots had to be taken and masked around certain elements and then finally tracked; such as elements of the claws and tallons, elements of the eagles belly, the legs etc. Along with the ebsynthed shots of Thorin, this was by far the most time consuming and took an entire day of editing to complete just that one small shot.

The second roto was of the eagle landing behind Gandalf. Again, this was done to match continuity of the eagle coming in to land from the previous shot of Gadalf being dropped on to the Carrock. Once again, the original shot that this eagle was taken from had Gandalf in front of it which obscured elements for the roto. In the end, I rotoscoped around Gandalf and then split the roto of the eagle in half, as this made scaling and positioning much easier so that I could still keep elements of the eagle obscured. The most time consuming part was creating a mask in between the individual feathers of the wing in order to remove some of the wayward elements of the roto which had included elements of the sky from the original shot, which didn't match the new background with the eagle flying across the sky.

The third roto is imperfect but I feel works in a way. However, if people noticeably see that it's a shaky roto then I will remove the third one of the eagle flying in the distance.

After this, the original music track I used in my first draft had to be repositioned and timed, as well as inserting sound effects all the way through the scene, such as the sound of beating wings, the Dwarves laughing, Thorin scrambling on the rock and being lifted to his feet, Bilbo's sighing, Gandalf's laugh, wind, footsteps and movement. All of these were taken either from sound effects across all three films or from YouTube. Most of them were lifted from moments across the films though.

As a final touch, I also colour corrected the sky on the two New Zealand scenery shots in order to better match visual continuity in the transition.

All in all, I'm very happy with this updated version and I'm very eager to get feedback on this. Again, this idea wouldn't have been possible without the previous feedback I received on the Carrock. So thanks again to you all!

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