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. ;-)

From entertainmentdesignmag.com : Because Jackson wanted to use the varied landscape of New Zealand's two main islands for shooting, identifying the proper locations was an important part of the art department's job. "We saw pretty quickly that Hobbiton needed a very, very long run-up time to it," says production designer Grant Major. "It's a rural kind of landscaped set. Our search was around the upper North Island, in a place called Hamilton, which has a lot of imported, deciduous trees - oaks and other northern European types. We found a piece of sheep farm with the right sort of scripted features." More than a year before the October 1999 start of shooting (springtime for New Zealanders), the landscaping crew, with some help from the New Zealand Army, formed roads, recontoured fields, and planted hedgerows, trees, gardens, and grass. "We needed that whole growth period of one year," says Major. Hillocks were constructed and Hobbit holes were excavated, where facades of settings like Frodo's Bag End house and the Green Dragon Pub were eventually installed; studio interiors at Three-Foot-Six matched the exteriors.

The top 5 films at the New Zealand Box-Office features the complete Trilogy (March 2004) :

1. The Lord Of The Rings : Fellowship Of The Ring - $14,608,889
2. The Lord Of The Rings : The Return Of The King - $12,978,554
3. Titanic - $12,967,660
4. The Lord Of The Rings : The Two Towers - $12,134,489
5. Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone - $7,800,612

From Horsewyse magazine, Australian horse trainer Grahame Ware Jnr., who was involved in the training of horses used in The Two Towers said : "We did a lot of de-sensitizing with the horses to prepare them for the battle scenes. We had to teach them to be calm in all situations. [...] The horse was taught to stand on a mark and rear over the top of a camera. We buried a plexiglass-covered box containing the camera in the ground and the horse had to rear over the top of this. Director, Peter Jackson also wanted the horse to land with his hooves right in the middle of the glass. That took some doing... I had about three weeks to work on the horse and the scene was shot in a studio set. [...] We had around 50 horses for that scene [a battle scene] and of these, 20 were owned by the production company and 30 were ridden by their owners. So we not only had to train the horses to work in a studio set, but train the owner/riders as well, to help them understand the basics of filming. We set up some obstacle courses and basically de-sensitized the horses and turned them into fearless machines. In the end those horses were so confident they could have done anything! It was all about never hurting the horses or letting them get upset...keeping them calm and relaxed at all times. Around 35 of those horses were thoroughbreds so we really had our work cut out !"

"Blanco and Demero shared the role of Shadowfax but I chose to work mainly with Blanco throughout the film and swapped them around for some of the stunts. I found Blanco the better horse to work with. It's hard to have a horse that rears and does liberty work, then put actors on them. This meant I worked with Ian McKellen, who I found to be very obliging and good to work with. He's not a 'horse person' as such but he had a lot of respect for the horses."

"I trained a horse named Brownie for that scene [Aragorn is injured and lying wounded alongside a river. His horse locates him, rolls him over and lies down so Aragorn can scramble aboard], but a lot of the scene was cut which was a shame as it was probably the hardest thing I'd done and was under pressure to get it all together." While Brownie did that scene's stunts, the horse Aragorn rides off on was named Uraus, a warmblood stallion that Viggo liked so much he ended up purchasing him. [...] A stable was established near Wellington where 75 core production horses were trained. The actors were encouraged to visit the stables anytime to ride their horses and Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom often visited for a leisurely ride, even on their days off.

Shelob was voted the 6th Greatest Movie Monster of all-time by film experts over Empire magazine. King Kong was the 1st (April 2004).

Gollum was 10th in Premiere magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters of all-time. And side note, King Kong was judged the 30th greatest character (April 2004).

In 2003, JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings was voted Britain's favourite novel in an extensive BBC viewers' poll called The Big Read (it also won the recent German equivalent). In December 2004, The Lord Of The Rings was voted number one after the ABC launched the hunt for Australia's favourite book.

The Two Towers was named the third best movie sequel in history, in a poll conducted by Movies.com (November 2004).

Retail sales for LOTR related merchandise have exceeded more than $1 billion dollars worldwide (--November 2004). Over 300 licensees worldwide have created LOTR-inspired merchandise including toy manufacturers Mattel, Play Along, and NECA; collectibles licensees such as Sideshow Toy, The Noble Collection, MBI/Danbury Mint, Bradford Exchange and United Cutlery.

From NZHerald.co.nz (December 2004) : "All three movies in Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy have made it into the top 30 in the Ultimate Film Chart, compiled by the British Film Institute (BFI), which lists the top 100 films based on estimated cinema admissions in Britain. Estimated admissions rather than the box office takings were used to compile the list, as the BFI thinks this is a more consistent indicator of popularity. Gone With The Wind (1939) came in at No 1 with an estimated audience of 35 million. The Sound Of Music (1965) was second (30 million). The Fellowship Of The Ring appears on the list at number 16, ahead of The Return Of The King at 19 and The Two Towers at 22."

The Return Of The King has been voted best film of the year in BBC's Film 2004 Show hosted by Jonathan Ross. (December 2004). The Fellowship Of The Ring and The Two Towers also took the title in 2002 and 2003.

Gollum's quote "My Precious" in The Two Towers has been voted the 85th greatest movie-quotes of all-time by American Film Institute (June 2005). Clark Cable's line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind has topped the list. A jury of 1,500 actors, actresses, critics and historians selected the quote as the most memorable in the history of cinema for a new three-hour television special hosted by Pierce Brosnan for CBS-TV.

On July 2005, Amazon.com has celebrated its 10th anniversary of the day that the site first opened its virtual doors for business. Amazon honored its all-time bestselling authors, musicians and DVDs into a special Hall of Fame. The Fellowship Of The Ring topped the site's Hall of Fame dvds, The Two Towers was second and The Return Of The King third. J.R.R. Tolkien was No. 8 at Amazon's Hall of Fame authors.

SyFlex is the cloth simulator used in The Return Of The King. From SyFlex.biz : "SyFlex dressed up digital characters in New Line Cinema's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King", visual effects by Weta Digital. As most of Weta Digital's work centered on creatures and characters, cloth became an important part in the studio's special effects creation. Weta Digital discovered Syflex's cloth simulation technology while the production of the epic trilogy was already on its way, and ended up using it in more than 600 shots in the last movie."

"The speed and reliability of SyFlex allowed Weta to create highly realistic cloth animations for practically all digital characters and doubles in the film, including Legolas, Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, the WitchKing, King Theoden and the Rohan riders. In the DVD edition, SyFlex was also used for Aragorn and Saruman. SyFlex was not only used for a whole variety of clothes, but also for many dynamic objects such as Gollum's hair and the Mumakil Tower's cloth panels."

Duncan Nimmo, the IT manager of Peter Jackson's production company Three Foot Six, was carrying sequences from The Lord Of The Rings on his iPod pocket computer when he was approached by two big blokes in London's Soho district at 5am : "I walked faster and they walked faster, then I broke into a jog and they started running. I could not have the iPod with the film taken off me, so I ran and got away."

Another bad moment for the Lord Of The Rings IT staff was in sending the final versions of the 2nd and 3rd instalments of the Trilogy to Hollywood via satellite. Weta Digital revealed it experienced a 60-hour network outage caused by a switch failure as it raced to ramp up its systems to meet production demands.

Ian McKellen's Gandalf The Grey costume was specially altered so that he could keep a copy of The Lord Of The Rings close to his chest at all times. He said "I had a pocket inserted into Gandalf The Grey's robes to hold the weighty tome of the Trilogy as a reference during filming."

Hercules, the dog that starred in The Fellowship Of The Ring (his scene showed him barking at the Ringwraith) died at the age of 12, on May 2004. The dog from Tuakau, south of Auckland, had an impressive CV that included some more than 80 television commercials. Hercules died while filming a series of training videos aimed at helping children avoid being bitten by dogs. His owner Mark Vette paid tribute to the dog's intelligence, saying Hercules understood more than 130 commands and had a knack for picking up new tricks very quickly.

From Forbes.com, June 2004 : "Jackson, 42, suddenly is one of the richest and most powerful people in the movie business, having turned J.R.R. Tolkien's classic into a film franchise that has generated $4 billion in ticket sales, DVDs and merchandise. In all Jackson, as director and producer, has reaped more than $125 million from the three Rings films, an oeuvre that took eight years of his life to complete. In the past year he earned $35 million, ranking him 20th in pay and 12th overall on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list. He got a 7.5% cut of the gross profits from DVD sales of the second Rings film and from theater sales for the third."