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Mixing reality with fabulous effect

I watched “The return of the king” last night – the third and last (well it would be wouldn’t it!!!) in the trilogy of “Lord of the Rings”. Its a film I’ve seen before, when it first came out, a few years ago. I saw it at the cinema, and loved it. Seeing it again, after a few years break I was reminded again of the superb effects that were used. New Zealand is a stunning country – I’ve been and seen it, and found it astounding how diverse the geography of the land is – which is why it was perfect as the back-drop for the fantasy fairytale of Lord of the Rings. And as I sat and watched it again last night, albeit on a tv screen this time, I gasped out loud at how stupendous the computer graphic images were. The attention to detail was tremendous. Sometimes the action was so detailed, that I made a point of watching one of the small insignificant creatures in the background, and they behaved with the most perfect detail – so that if you had been watching them solely, on the screen, and all the other myriad of creatures were removed from the picture, you would have been perfectly happy that they were doing what you would expect within that vast landscape. Of course, the minute you add a thousand other creatures all doing the same thing, it made it mind-blowing for the attention for detail.

Except for one scene.

The last scene, actually.

There was a mistake in it. One that to me, as an artist, was obvious. And yet it had been left there, with the screamingly obvious mistake in it. Why would that be?

So, the film has fired me up, to want to create images of such detail that even the tiniest figure within the image is correct. But, its made me wonder how much we disregard  mistakes within artwork, because the rest of the image “works” for us, so we just accept it without question…………….