Ringing in 20 years of movie magic in the home of Middle-earth Back in 2001, NZ Post set out to celebrate the upcoming release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Designed by Sacha Lees, the stamps combined images of scenes from the film with imagery evoking the mythology and magic of its setting. Lees had spent the previous few years working for Weta Workshop as an illustrator, airbrush artist, creature designer and concept artist for the trilogy. Two decades on, the award-winning artist embarked on a new journey with NZ Post to celebrate a masterpiece. You have spent many years of your life working on projects relating to The Lord of the Rings, including the films. What was it like to be behind the scenes? Intense, hard work, long hours, fun. The time during the creation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was incredibly and intensely focused and both physically and mentally demanding. I loved that Weta was a very small company, which meant I was able to cross over artistic disciplines working on all aspects of the films, from storyboarding, designing and prop, set and prosthetic production to on-set filming. Somehow I even found myself puppeteering big rigs for hobbit-scale effects and hand acting in the Gollum torture scene. The variety and the need for creative problem-solving ticked all the boxes for me. New Zealand’s film industry was in its infancy, providing a wonderful opportunity for an artist like myself, new to it, to work alongside likeminded international artisans at the top of their fields. How did you decide on the scenes to include in the NZ Post stamps? I began by sketching what I felt were iconic scenes and notable characters from the first film. There were so many it was hard to stop. Once the NZ Post team had reviewed the drawings it was difficult to narrow them down to six, but ultimately we decided on a set that represented key points of the film’s narrative and that complemented each other and worked well in a stamp format. What was your method in creating the stamps? Why not just use photos? I felt that to be faithful to the aesthetics of the film it would be best to illustrate these iconic scenes through a hand-painted medium. This also allowed the capture of a large part of the narrative. The medium of film gives your imagination the ability to fill in the detail, but it does not translate well into a stand-alone image. For example, a screengrab of the epic Gandalf vs. Balrog battle scene, due to its motion in the footage, is mostly a 4
collectables.nzpost.co.nz
