Pretty cool stuff.  Did you use a bit of green screen in Mountain top fire?

No Shawn, no keying, everything with 'In Search of the Donut' is live. There was one shot where the camera couldn't decide what aperture to go with, and made a shadow around Frogo (the shot that is in the youtube thumbnail), giving the impression it was keyed. The scenery certainly looks almost unreal (like the NZ scenery is), so that probably adds to the effect. I have started to stabilize shots. Blender works for still shots, but I am still trying to perfect a system for panned shots. 'Deshaker' plugin for Virtualdub , in windows, is the best free software for stabilizing I have found. But Blender works, with a bit of effort...and I am using Blender for the occasional patch to cover puppeteer heads etc. I started the series when we went to NZ filming by myself from a small homemade tripod, but my daughter ended up as my cameraman and she got quite good at it.

We still care! Awesome scenes, like your music.

Thanks Snail.

Frogo is on the move again, down from the mountains. Conclusion... it would be very hard to light a signal fire on top of a real mountain range, but in fictitious Middle Earth, anything is possible. So now, Frogo gets ready for a trip around the south of the South Island of New Zealand... to continue  'In Search of the Donut'.

.. and  Frogo Heads down southward in New Zealand... see what he finds

So do they normally do tours of the insulator factory or did you just walk up to the door and ask for one?  Pretty cool to see all that!

Shawn, it was just the way it happens some times. The brewery was mentioned in the tour guide, and the place it said was the town I was living in, so I made inquiries and it turned out it was actually another town with the same name, although there was a subsidiary in my home town... but I didn't go as far as knocking on the door , although I did knock on the door in my home town to find out it was the other town. The Insulator factory just happened to be where my nephew works, so we got a private tour. Many of the other places we went we were privy to insider information. NZ is a small place and during the making of the films, 1 in 7 people in the country had something to do with it, so you come across people who know people. There were a few leads we did not manage to swing on, due to one thing or another, like a real life Hobbit house a little south of the insulator factory. A mayor or dignitary of that town literally built a full human sized Hobbit house in which he now lives underground in. We got referrals like Joe knows me Fred, so just drive up there and mention I know you and I am sure he'd love to show you around. But when we got to the crossroads to head up there, there was too much tension in the car, and we were not sure just how far up the road it was, so I winced and drove past. Or another day we could have chatted with some 'horsemen from Rohan', but ran out of time that day. In 2007, we were gifted a horse trek in our home town, and it turned out that one of our kids was sitting atop Gandalf's white horse. We have photos of that still... and there is a whole list of anecdotal info of such things that did not get into Frogo's video journey... such as the the job interview (no job resulted though)  with a local company which tendered to pave such and such a field for the crew head quarters for such and such a shoot, but another field was used.. or a friend who's field was considered for headquarters for 2 weeks, but did not happen.... and the oh, my friend X did all the drawings for the maps, or the jeweler in my home town made the first rings, but has died since.. but Frogo did get to meet his son and handle some replicas....etc etc. It was all very good fun, when we could fit it in.

HI all, I am back in Colombia after a quick funeral trip to New Zealand. Frogo did manage to find the 'Hobbit house mentioned in the  above post while there, but it really was not as spectacular as it sounds. In the meantime a couple episodes have been done of 'In Search of The Donut'



...and Frogo gets to the southern most point of New Zealand. And can you believe he met some puppet tourists from  Austria?

Love them.