Hobbiton

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Ah yes, The Shire at last, for those of you who don't care about my nerdy adventures, this entire post will be about our visit to The Shire - you've been warned.

Ok, so today we drove up from Waitomo and stopped in at Matamata which is where the tours of the Hobbiton movie set leave from. This was certainly the highlight of our day. The set is on a private, 1250 acre sheep farm and is only accessable through these tours. The farm itself is located on Buckland Rd. and that road has had that name for over 100 years (awesome coincidence not know when the location was chosen).

So after Peter Jackson realized he had all of the filming he wanted for the trilogy he gave the instruction to destroy all of the sets and return all of the land they used to its previous state. All of the decorations had been removed from the Shire and the hobbit holes and 20 of the 37 holes had been completely destroyed when it started to pour and kept on pouring for many days. The demolitions crew gave up and said they'd come back in 6 months to finish the job when th site was safer for their machines. Over those 6 months tons of people who had learned the location of the Shire came to the farm asking if they could see the set and so finally the owners got permission to set up this tour company and 2 years after filming finished tours started. This means that the set isn't at all like it was in the movies, the decorations are all gone and for some reason New Line Cinemas won't let the tour company repaint any of the hobbit holes, plant flowers in front of them, or in any way make them look more like the movie than they do now. This plus the fact that all interior hobbit-hole shots were done in studios led to Hobbiton looking very much like the remains of a set and not like the movie itself. That said, it was still really cool.

The tour was full of lots of fun facts about the building of the sets and the filming of the movies. Some of which follow:

-90% of the brick in the Shire was made of painted styrofoam (made by a company Peter Jackson bought)
-Peter Jackson was in all 3 movies for about 1 second each
-They cut a giant oak tree into many parts and put it back together on top of Bilbo's house and imported 25,000 leaves from Taiwan and attatched them to this rebuilt tree and it was in a total of 38 seconds of the film
-The sky over the Shire was made into a no-fly-zone and 3 pilots lost their liscences for flying overhead with camera equipment onboard
-Almost all shots of Bilbo from behind were actually his 10-year-old stunt double
-Peter Jackson bought a brewery and had them brew a special "Sobering thought" beer that was 1% alcohol and this was used for all scenes of drinking in the movie
-Peter Jackson bought a nursery and had their entire business used for all of the gardens in the Shire
-Even though there were 12,000 sheep on the farm, they brought in a different breed of sheep to play the ones that appear in the Shire

Alright, that's about all that comes to mind so I'll go ahead and post some pictures now.

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Photos

The Shire and us
and the Party Tree in the background

Just Kidding
This is a picture of an enlarged picture taken during filming

From then to now
This is Bag End (Bilbo's home)

One more time
He's obviously not a hobbit

From the Inside Out
Looking from inside Bilbo's home down at the Party Tree

Comments

[Kate]

Hi boys!
You two must have been like little kids in a candy store. Glad you got to Hobbiton.

[Lisa, Dennis and Atumn]

Yay for Hobbits!
You guys are so funny! It looks beautiful, but you're a bit big to be hobbits :)