I Can't Wait for Christmas-time, and It Ain't 'Cause I'm Expecting Santa Claus!

For as excited as I was about getting my Fellowship of the Ring DVD in the mail (despite any minor disappointements involved), I still haven't found time to watch hardly any of the stuff on the discs (including, alas, the movie itself). I did, however, watch the "Behind the Scenes Preview of The Two Towers" feature, and, wow, am I hyped about this movie! Even more so than I was before, I mean. Several of the folks involved in the process venture comments along the lines of: "We can't wait to see how this film is recieved, because everybody talks about how stunning and how epic the first one was, but what we're doing with the second movie just blows the first one out of the water." Ordinarily, I'd mostly chalk that up to self-promotion and take it with a grain of salt, but, artistically speaking, these people have earned my trust, and if they're telling me "you ain't seen nothin' yet," I'm inclined to believe them. Especially given that the glimpses of finished product they showed looked quite suitably impressive.

The behind-the-scenes info was pretty neat, too. I was particularly fascinated by the description of how they're animating the vast, clashing armies for the second film. Apparently they're not animating the actions of each individual combatant by hand (so to speak). What they do instead is to create each character and program it with a particular fighting style. And then they just let them all... fight. On their own. Self-directed. Man, is technology these days cool, or what?