The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power VFX artist Ara Khanikian reveals how The Stranger’s battle scene was brought to life and what made the effects so difficult to edit. TheLord of the Rings prequel series explores the beauty of Middle Earth through a new lens, bringing in the newest technology to sell the fantasy. While the original trilogy was critically acclaimed for its visual effects, Rings of Power captured even more of Tolkien’s iconic imagery, exploring new methods to help bring it to life.

While breaking down Rings of Power‘s visual effects with Corridor Crew, Khanikian revealed what made The Stranger’s battle scene with the witches so challenging, and how his team put the sequence together. The scene’s visual effects focused on nature to capture The Stranger’s magic, using the elements to show his power and foreshadow what’s to come. Check out Khanikian’s scene breakdown below:

“The hardest part about this sequence, honestly, was everything put together in the sense that this is all happening in the same environment. So, it was all done on set, they built this whole forest-kind of environment surrounded by blue screen — which looked fantastic, by the way — and then what we were doing was adding a little bit of enhancements to the ground so that they’re not super flat. So we added additional roots, additional rocks and more debris, we built that complete environment in CG from scratch and we had to be able to wipe from set to CG version for any single angle, we had to have it in CG, because the environment was evolving throughout the sequence.

“Starting in the beginning, it’s a calm environment, and then the wind picks up, so as the wind picks up, it’s CG debris flying everywhere, it’s CG leaves in the wind, it’s branches and trees in the wind, so those need to be CG, and then at some point, we have to burn the environment down. This is where you built it in CG, so that you can put fire through it and the embers through it and smoke going through it, and then after you’re done burning it, you have to show a variant of that environment without vegetation, so that everything is burnt off, so that all you have is the rock and everything smoldering and you have a beautiful almost snow of embers coming down.”

Does LOTR’s VFX Hold Up Against Rings of Power?

While TheLord of the Rings was praised in its day for its large-scale set design and impressive VFX, this new adaption of Middle Earth could have it beat, as Rings of Power flexes its new-age technology. The prequel comes 20 years after TheLord of the Rings: The Return of the King and visual effects have advanced a fair bit since 2003. The VFX of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings have for the most part fared well across the years, but some effects – particularly what at the time was ground-breaking CGI – do show their age.

Gandalf fighting the Balrog may look epic, for instance, but Gandalf standing beside the Hobbits can look out of place at times. The fully-CGI character of Gollum was another element celebrated at the time but in hindsight seems almost cartoonish. In the years since, a The Lord of the Rings VFX artist has even pointed out Gollum’s problems.

For its time, the VFX of The Lord of the Rings trilogy was incredibly advanced and many scenes still look amazing. The trilogy was the first to realize Tolkien’s world-building so successfully and it established the imagery of Middle-earth. Without it, Rings of Power wouldn’t have had as strong a foundation on which to realize its vision for Middle-earth.