The Newest ‘Hobbit’ Video Blog Wraps Things Up Beautifully, Leaves Many Cold Yaks In Its Wake

Pardon me, I have something in my eye.

Principal photography has wrapped on the two — possibly threeHobbit films, and Peter Jackson has released the eighth video blog from the set. We get to see Radagast’s house, Beorn’s house, Goblintown, and the amazing-looking city of Dale. I want to go to there. We also see cameos from Sylvester McCoy, Orlando Bloom, Luke Evans, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Graham McTavish, and other actors. Also, Andy Serkis was playing saxophone at one point, unfortunately not while wearing a mo-cap suit, so I guess we won’t be seeing Smeagol do that. Damn.

They also cover some pretty mindblowing trivia about what went into the Hobbit production, including 20 liters of prosthetics glue and 50 miles of yak hair. A crew member says, “There are a lot of cold yaks in the Himalayas somewhere.” For Smaug’s lair, they bought out all of the gold paint in Australasia and had to order more from Germany. They would have used 22,817,520 feet of 35 mm film if the two movies hadn’t been shot digitally. And one of their artists showed off a large bowl of pencil stubs left over after doing over 2,500 drawings during the shoot.

Part of this blog was shown at San Diego Comic-Con two weekends ago. This online version includes a bit of footage shot at that panel. A 45-minute video from the panel is available here, which I’ll admit I didn’t watch because Comic-Con panels seem like a whole lot of waiting around for very little payoff. Much like my sex life.

HD available at Facebook. Previous set videos are available here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, assuming some of them haven’t been pulled yet. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens in the U.S. on December 14th of this year and The Hobbit: There and Back Again comes out December 13, 2013.

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