Production Designer Grant Major began his career in design at Television New Zealand. His projects ranged from production design for the Commonwealth Games ceremonies to conceptualizing the New Zealand Pavilions at the World Expos in Australia and Spain. His feature film credits include Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994) and The Frighteners (1996), as well as Jane Campion's Angel at My Table (1992), the cult horror film The Ugly (1997) and last year's Whale Rider.

Set Decorator Dan Hennah studied architecture at the Wellington Polytechnic School of Architecture before beginning his career as one of New Zealand's top art directors. His previous feature film credits include the popular German television series "Treasure Island" (2001), the Rob Cohen thriller Nate and Hayes (1988), and, coming in 2005, Peter Jackson's big-budget remake of King Kong.

Let's talk about the creation of Minas Tirith - the method of taking paintings and concept art and having it have to be this huge thing that has to be specific to the story.

Dan Hennah: The truth comes in analyzing the book. The book is actually quite specific in its description and we made a model - an architectural model - and it was a little over-the-top, so we toned it down. We really workshopped with WETA. We were looking for architectural clues for what it would look like - we referenced a lot of Roman books to decide what it would look like. It has to have a sort of presence to it. We just worked it out slowly - we figured out what we were going to build and what we weren't going to build, what we could afford and what we can't afford.

We actually built it over the bones of the old Helm's Deep set. We used the same location and structures and changed them a little.

How did you decide what would be built and what would be CGI?

DH: There are storyboards, and we had a series of meetings in the early days of the production where we talked about game plans for how to do this. There was always room for CGI stuff in wide shots and set pieces were more realistic. It was mostly a matter of finding out where the majority of the action took place, and then the creation of a jigsaw of actionaries that linked together in particular ways. It's a process.

What are the easiest things to do in these movies? We always hear about the hard stuff...

DH: The dressing side of things is good because you've thought about things to such a degree and the things have taken a 3-dimensional shape, and things come together when you add the human element into it - the people who live in Minas Tirith, for example, the way they live their lives and things - it's easy, but it's enjoyable.

Grant Major: It's also important because it creates the illusion of layers and layers of information telling us how they live. The authenticity of that race is very important. For me, getting up each morning was the easiest thing about this (laughs). I was looking forward to new stuff.

Was there a sense while you were working on this that you'd never be able to work on this scale again?

DH: We certainly got accustomed to the big picture. It was fantastic to work on that scale, sure. For me, it's a different way of thinking about how you do something. Instead of coming into a room with a 20x20 blue screen, you put up a wall of containers and paint them blue - well, coat them with ply and paint them blue. It's that sort of scale - you're faced with a whole different set of practicalities. And instead of having one or two draftsmen, you have ten draftsmen.

GM: It's a quantum enlargement of what we usually do. We just multiply it. We were confident that this was going to be one of the biggest set pieces.

What standards have these movies set for others to follow?

GM: I'd like to think that we started off the project with the highest standards we could get and it was really a matter of maintaining that over the years.

DH: I certainly started off with lesser expectation, and every month and day things just sort of grew and grew and got bigger. And your expectations grew, as well.

GM: Obviously the fifteen months of shooting were stressful because we were shooting so fast, but people kind of warmed to the task as the year went on so things seemed to be way more doable toward the end of the shoot than they were...

DH: You also have to remember that we started off with one unit and that grew to a second unit and a ‘b' unit on the main unit - we ended up working with seven units, so it was just splitting forces and keeping focused on what Peter's doing, and sort of stretching resources.

Is there anything different you would have done if you had the chance to go back and redo some of the early stuff you had done?

GM: I've never really thought about that.

DH: The first thing we really did was build Hobbiton. We built it a year before we were going to shoot - we wanted grass to grow, we wanted the flowers to grow - we wanted it to be real. And that sort of gave us a year to get our feet on the ground. I can't think of anything that I would do differently. Certainly over the five years we developed techniques that were better at the end than the beginning in general.

GM: Our greenspeople were fantastic and they were able to achieve so much more toward the end because they got so good at it. We never really had a big ‘greens' industry - sub-industry - but by the end of it we certainly did. I think people who were able to hit their stride during production were able to achieve so much more.

DH: There was not a better-looking result, it was about the quantity of it and the shortcuts you'd take.

The CGI and miniatures in the film are blended together almost seamlessly. What were some of the larger miniatures you used?

GM: Minas Tirith - Richard Taylor called them "bigatures." They were beyond miniatures. Those were about 6-7 meters tall. It's all the big architectural things.

DH: Barad-dur was pretty important. And Isengard.

GM: As a matter of planning where we finished and where WETA started, there was a little bit of gray area between the two so we did tend to sometimes create forced perspective. So sometimes sets that were 1:1 foreground became 1:20 with no back. The Paths of Kirithungol is a good example - we have Shelob's Lair going toward the tower - that was a model that was kind of at the end of the set.

DH: There was also the cave in Minas Tirith that Gandalf comes riding out of - that was forced perspective.