11 Oscars win for Lord of the Rings (including Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup and Best Custume Design.)

The 3rd and final installment of the "Lord of the Rings" (LOTR) trilogy scored a historical Oscars clean-sweep, winning 11 awards including Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup, Best Custume Design and Best Art Direction. All these would have not been possible without the huge production team behind it. In the 5 years of filming, 250 people created 68 miniatures, 300 input layers of various types, 570 special effects shots, 1,000 suits of armor, 1,800 body and prosthetic suits, 2000 weapons and 10,000 facial appliances and arrows. Follow us as we take you on a magical journey to see how Middle Earth, Gollum and the various characters in the movie are created.

Building Middle Earth Text: Foo Siang Yew

Rome was not built in a day. Neither was Middle Earth.

It took Peter Jackson and his team of 250 artists almost 2 years (1 year for the main photography and 10 months for the special effects) to painstakingly put together every single frame of the show to build a fantasy world of Middle Earth landscapes for the trilogy's more than 1,200 visual effects shots.

New Zealand's WETA Digital is in charge of film's special effects.

Middle earth too was created digitally. With the use of the latest technology, miniatures and the "blue screen", WETA Digital was able to larger than life buildings, creatures and landscapes simply by creating miniatures of a smaller size.

Work on such miniatures began two and a half years before filming begin at WETA workshop. Some of these miniatures live action site construction are the largest that New Zealand has ever built. The WETA people even coined the phrase 'biggatures' to describe its enormous size.

<< On the right: A motion control camera careens around and up the 1/166 scale, hyper-detailed miniature of the Barad-dûr tower. In the film, Sauron's minions construct the looming tower by the light of a thousand torches.

Sometimes, the actors will be acting in front of the blue screen so that many breath taking senery can be added into that particular scene during the film's post production. This is also a great test of an actor's acting ability as they have to imagine that the senery or people are really around them.

Such technology enables film maker like Peter Jackson to create the "impossible".

Perhaps one of the great successes of the movie is that the animation, and the special effects in general, was so well integrated into the story's telling thatmost movie goers could barely tell what's real and what's make believe.

While the special effects are as much an accomplishment of the software programmers, who are oftentimes writing code late into the night, the state-of-the-art technology is only a starting point. Cook points out, "Massive, as an artificial intelligence program, is nevertheless only as good as the movement put into it, some of which is done by animation, yet much of which is done by motion-capture."

Now, see how it's done on video!

Discover how cutting-edge technology was used to create an epic battle scene on the fields of Mordor and Helms Deep.