Extra tidbits
We finished the Two Towers appendices today. Holy crow, there is a lot of stuff there. Very interesting, too; I do enjoy hearing people who take pride in their work talk about how they do it. I don’t always understand what they’re up to, mind you, but I do invariably respond with a smile to that kind of artisan’s gratification in good work.
There’s a bit of David’s work in the Appendices that isn’t credited to him (probably because it’s all unsigned; it was never intended for anything but clues to the production team). Two or three times, you see somewhat shaky black-on-white calligraphy pages in various letter-styles. One I know is the page on Sting (Maegnas); the others I don’t recall offhand—but that’s David’s work. They’re the pages he wrote up and faxed to WETA and New Line, very early on in the grand scheme of things.
The calligraphy is shaky partly because it was done in a great hurry (the word “urgent” was affixed to just about every request they ever made of him) and partly because David is left-handed and has to hold his pen in a very awkward position so as not to smear the writing. Of course none of his calligraphy got directly transferred to anything (weapons or maps or whathaveyou); they found pro designers and calligraphers to do that, and those folks did quite a smashing job from what I’ve seen.
Still. Good enough to make a major DVD release, eh? Pretty cool, I thought.