Co-Producer Rick 'Spike' Porras began his career as a production associate and research archivist for Robert Zemeckis on his films Death Becomes Her (1992) and Forrest Gump (1994), eventually moving up to Associate Producer on the director's 1997 blockbuster Contact, starring Jodie Foster. Co-Producer on the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, Return of the King won him and the production team their first Academy Award.

How did you come to co-produce the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

Peter (Jackson) brought me in way back when. Richard Taylor had a team of a few in-house designers - a think-tank - at WETA Workshop and basically, when I started, it was just getting Peter through the design process. Around that time, he went and visited (George) Lucas and those guys, and Lucas was really kind and was showing him what he was doing with Pre-Viz.

How instrumentation was that on what you did on Lord of the Rings?

That became our model. Lucas has always been helpful about stuff and Peter saw how he was using it. In a sense, it's a similar business model, because Lucas is a filmmaker and has a visual effects house at his disposal, and there's a long history of interaction between them. Pete saw this and thought it was great and thought it was a great tool - Pete had already been an avid sotryboard filmmaker. I think he had boarded as early as - I mean I started in May of 1998 and he had big chunks of the movie done already.

How comfortable was Peter Jackson with the process?

The idea of pre-visualization was nothing new for him. I used to work for Zemeckis and he would board really intense effects sequences, but he wouldn't board the whole movie. Pete boarded the whole movie.
So he saw what Lucas was doing and he came back and said, "This would be a really good thing for us to do." Basically, they just got the concept - you bring in young guys who are really talented graphic artists who really know how to use technology. Lucas and those guys were working with Apple stuff - for us in New Zealand it was easier for us to do the PC 3-D MAX route, which is what we put together. I just found one guy for starters and we just kept going and we ended up with about eight guys.

The people we had were straight out of design school. They were really great with technology, but they didn't necessarily know film. So we started a little film school. I brought in Brian Van Tollin, who had worked with pre-viz for a few films - he was WETA's kind of in-house camera guy and he lectured them about cameras and whatnot. I think even Andrew Leslie came in at one point. We did everything to get them to understand what it was all about. When we did the camera test, we'd bring these guys out and they'd look through the camera lens and we'd have them where we were going to rent the cranes from - we wanted them to have a physical understanding of what it means to have a crane shot.

WETA gave us this little software thing to only let the guys use the lenses we were using, so you never had that "really cool shot but I can't really go out and shoot it" kind of thing. And we tied it in to our design process.
Pete would storyboard something and if he felt he wanted it to be pre-vised, he'd take it to the pre-viz artist, who would look at the framing, get the lens that would match it the best - sometimes the design process was already done in that area, so that would be incorporated. For example, there were some sets that had been done in CAD so we could actually get that into the computer. So when Peter is looking at a pre-viz shot of Hobbiton, that's all correct. That actually fits the location where we moved the earth around. Or when he was doing the great stairs of Moria sequence - that was all built based off the model.

Do you find that pre-viz makes things harder on producers and production designers, having to move stuff around and built 360 degree four-wall sets and everything?

We use it in such a practical way, so hand in hand with the design process that to us, we never felt like it was creating a nightmare, it was just making things more enlightening. The art department was not caught off guard as much as they might have been with the director bringing a new idea on the day. It also gave guys like grips and Andrew Lesnie the ability to say, "Peter may expand - let's bring in some more bluescreens if we need them. Let's have some flexibility."

In the end, it helped us more than it created problem. Great directors are going to think about stuff anyway. I worked for Zemeckis, and he was this way, too. These guys just have such a great visual sense. If anything, it helps them crystallize things and let them come up with an even cooler shot.

While you were working, how did the technology change? And what is the next phase of pre-viz technology?

I never really thought we were using state-of-the-art technology - we were using satellite technology to keep an eye on all the units. Well, that's not new, but maybe the way we were using it was. I think what will be cool is when that stuff gets faster. I think all we need is a better version of what we were working with - that will make things more fluid.

We've used technology a lot on this picture and it's saved us a lot of time. I was in London for three weeks working on the score and Pete was in London for a big chunk of that, but then he had to go back to New Zealand to finish the movie. Ordinarily, you'd like to score and then do your final mix, but we were overlapping and technology really saved us with that where not only did we have these links that allowed Peter to watch these sequences in London - we call them PolyCom sessions - but he could look at visual effects stuff at WETA and point to stuff and get his vision across.

Also, we had the ability when he was in New Zealand - and the time change was just perfect - we could record for four hours and take a meal break and he could go into his living room and listen to what we recorded, and again - over the PolyCom - see Howard and talk to him and give him notes and then Howard could utilize those corrections and finish things in the afternoon.

Or we could even go so far - which we did - Harry was at the stand and Peter was giving Howard notes like he was standing there right in the booth, but he was in New Zealand in his shorts. That really helped. And then within thirty minutes - you can send the recordings down to the mix room - before it gets to the final mix stage - shit. We had the capacity to mix that stuff at Abbey Road: Theoretically, in thirty minutes, it could be on the mixing stage in Wellington.

We're getting closer to that real time scenario. It gives us fluidity - it saved us in terms of time crunches and multiple processes. In the old days, it was all very linear - you shot, you cut, you locked, you scored, you did your final mix - now we can overlap.