Here are compulsed all the little "stories" that happened before, during, and after the Lord Of The Rings' filming. We have also filled these pages with little facts you may ignored until now. ;-)

Source - Animation World Magazine : Weta supervisor Eric Saindon said : "We created a full-size animatronic puppet of Treebeard's upper torso that the actors sat on, and it was very stop-motionesque. Peter [Jackson] liked the way it moved, but it just didn’t feel real. The eyes didn’t have the depth that Peter wanted in them." Bay Raitt, who worked on the facial system for the hero creatures of the films, recalls, "[Creature technical director] Sven Jensen built controls for Treebeard such that you could control how jerky the bark on his face would move around. Even if you were moving his cheeks in a relaxed fashion, you could adjust how jerky the little pieces of bark would clunk around on his face. The idea was that he was supposed to be a really old tree, and to have him moving with a little difficulty. Steven Hornby was the lead animator on Treebeard, and he sort of ‘nailed’ that abrupt movement." The final Ents had over 2600 nerve patches and complex software tools to add complexity to the structural dynamics of making a tree move. Said Labrie, "You don't get to read a lot of detail because the basic colors are grey. But these became rigid mechanical bodies standing around and to provide something like this with emotion – ridges and moving eyes, it was a huge challenge."

Source - Animation World Magazine : Gollum's presence on-screen was crafted and honed by a team of 18 animators.

Bay Raitt, creature facial lead for The Lord of the Rings trilogy explained : "[The animators] took the data as a starting point, embellished it, sweetened it, and made sure the intent of the performance was really clear. Sometimes the footage was so blurry or bad, or the direction had changed, that it was entirely keyframing. It is important to note that there is no facial motion-capture data, at all, on Gollum. The only motion-capture data is for his torso, legs and arms. For Gollum's range of expressions, Raitt and his team created a system of sculpted faces for the animators to use. The animators would, almost like playing a musical instrument, use the facial system to bring Gollum's emotional world into being. Among the lead animators for Gollum were Adam Valdez, Atsushi Sato and Mike Stevens. While the animators definitely took a lead from Serkis, from an acting and presence point of view, as Raitt explains, "At the end of the day the animators were responsible for delivering the shot as a final piece of performance. Raitt sculpted the 875 combination shapes that are present in the articulated face of Gollum for the final film."

Source - 3D y la animación : Adam Valdez, Weta Digital animator : "Every piece of Gollum facial animation was created with animation. There was no motion capture for his face. One key step in creating his facial animation technically was a system built by Bay Raitt, which follows the muscles of the human face. It is important to understand how the muscles of the face combine to create expressivity and speech. If your character is a cartoon, this is not as critical. But with a realistic character like Gollum, some realism in technical approach is essential. Then you have to know how to animate. I'm not trying to sound cocky. But animation is of course the combination of technical issues with acting. So you have to think about the animation as if you yourself were going to act the scene for the camera. You have to feel the feelings and understand the character in that moment. I don't think most animators do that. Sometimes Gollum is like a cartoon. And sometimes, he is very serious and his expressions are very subtle. There are actors who have to play characters like this, too." 

From an interview with Weta Digital's Adam Valdez, April 2003 : "The 'digital doubles' were a team effort, crossing all departments. The modeling and texturing groups created a lot of important detail in the doubles. In the animation department, we combined motion capture and animation depending on the action required. Finally, the lighting and compositing departments did an amazing job of integrating the images together. I don't think they're all as real as you say, but there are some shots where I forget if they are real or if we put them there. My favorite one is that crazy shot in 'The Two Towers' when Legolas jumps in *front* of a galloping horse, and swings onto the horse's back! It's fun to make a hero a little more amazing."

John Howe and Alan Lee met each other for the first time in a plane to New Zealand, 30.000 feet high above Singapur.

Alan Lee made sketches for about 25 different Hobbits holes.

The ship that Gandalf makes with the smoke of his pipe was designed by Alan Lee.

The shot in which we can see Isengard for the first time consists of 5 or 6 photos, in reality there was only Ian McKellen riding on a horse.

To create the final shots of the Uruk-Hai and Orcs in the mines beneath Isengard, 50 sketches were made.

60 models of different sets were made for the three parts of the Lord of the Rings.

1997 : the first cave troll was drawn by Christian Rivers.

The most sketches were made for the Watcher in the Water.

One of the first sketches of Treebeard was made in 1997.

All in all, 9 different Ents were created. By manipulating them, these nice Ents could be used to show hundred of Ents in the same scene.

Frodo in the water of the Dead Marshes was shot like this : Elijah Wood hung above a wind machine and was shot in slow motion.

The sketches for Helm's Deep were ones of the first which were done.

All the facial expressions of Gollum were demonstrated by Peter Jackson on some photos.

The building of WETA first contained some swimming pools and then a hospital before it became the home of WETA.

To make the Orcs look like if they would sweat a special cream was needed. Hundreds of tubes of that cream were first bought in pharmacies until WETA finally got the recipe for that cream of the manufacturer.

65 trees were built for the set of Fangorn.

The Lord of the Rings was shot on more than 150 different places.

More than 4000 chairs and 1500 tables were bought for the cast and crew.

A 5 kilometers long road was especially built to reach the set of Edoras.

12 month were needed to build the set of Edoras, the shooting only lasted 3 weeks.

The leafs of the trees in Middle-Earth were made of a special silk which had to be imported from China.

Alan Lee drew more than 3000 sketches.

The first set of Parth Galen was destroyed by a flood of the rives so that it had to be built a second time.

The walls of the mines beneath Isengard were nailed with Kebab-spits.

10.000 digital Uruk-Hai fought in the battle at Helm's Deep.

The battles of the movie were first fought with little soldats that children use to play with, so that Peter Jackson and the actors could see how the Orcs and Men must move. WETA bought 75.000 of such soldats.

The model of Barad-dûr is 9 metres tall, the stone trolls are 4,5 metres tall.

40 models of dead horses were built for the movies.

The Palantír is made of wood, covered with a special wax.

Even the carpets were weaved in two different scales.

All in all, there were eight versions of Gandalf's staff.

320 saddles were made for The Lord of the Rings.

15 different versions of the One Ring were made by Jens Hansen.

The material for Gandalf's costume was weaved in Indonesia.

To create the Hobbit-feet 150 liters of silicon were needed every day.

50.000 different sounds were used in the three movies.

Jane Goodall, who is the wonderful and legendary lady who observes chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, for more than forty years, has named Frodo one of her chimps. Here is the way that Frodo is described : "Frodo is a large chimpanzee, weighing in at 115 pounds. Frodo often charges other members of the group, and he does not reciprocate when groomed by the other chimps. Frodo became the alpha male in 1998 and remains the dominant male in the group." And from another source : "Rowdy males, like the current bully Alpha male Frodo, seem to take delight in bashing people around as they display." Think Frodo's got the One Ring ??! If you want to read more about him, go here, here or here ! Also, visit the Jane Goodall Institute !

The NASA calls Saturn the "Real Lord of the Rings" because of the planet's bright and shiny rings.

The first snow-white tiger, that was born in Dassow's zoo (November 10, 2003) in eastern Germany, was named Aragorn. See here !

The skeleton of a Homo Floresiensis, the smallest human species ever discovered, was unearthed on Flores (in 2003), a remote Indonesian island. Scientists nicknamed her Hobbit : "Scientists, who unearthed her after 18,000 years, nicknamed her "Hobbit," after the short characters who starred in "Lord of the Rings." She stood 3 feet tall [also 40 inches tall] with a brain the size of a grapefruit [one-third the size of ours]. Yet she was smart enough to use tools, boats and probably language, and likely hunted pygmy elephants. Scientists found Hobbit and six other skeletons of this lost species on Flores, a remote Indonesian island. The discovery means that about 50,000 years ago, there were four species of humans roaming the Earth at the same time: Homo sapiens (us), Homo erectus, Neanderthals and this new relative, called Homo Floresiensis (also called Flores Man). The scientists who found the skeletons last year in a cave on the island, about 375 miles east of Bali, named their best specimen, a 30-year-old female, after the diminutive Tolkien fantasy characters. She and her contemporaries weighed about 55 pounds, had slightly longer arms than modern humans, had thicker eyebrow ridges than we do, sharply sloping foreheads and not much of a chin. In the past, researchers had figured that humans had to have big brains to evolve, but Hobbit makes them realize that "once you get to a certain size brain in humans, size doesn't matter; wiring (the way nerve cells are connected) matters," said Rick Potts, the director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History." Sources : SouthBendTribune - usatoday.com - BBC.co.uk

The hobbits needed to appear about three to four feet tall, tiny compared to the seven-foot Gandalf. This was often accomplished using forced perspective, placing Ian McKellen (Gandalf) consistently closer to the camera than Elijah Wood in order to trick the eye into thinking McKellen is towering. In order to make 'forced perspective' a bit more interesting, the filmmakers devised a totally new system consisting of a pulley and a platform. When the camera moved (which is normally impossible, as the forced perspective would become obvious) the actor(s) also moved, and the perspective (7-foot Gandalf - 4-foot hobbits) would always be okay.

The three trolls who were turned to stone in The Hobbit are in the background during the scene where Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Strider are resting after Frodo was wounded by a Nazgul.