Norman's Blog: Hobbiton

Sunday, 19 March 2023

Hobbiton

En route from New Plymouth to Auckland, we took a detour via Matamata to see Hobbiton.

The film set covers 12 acres of a 1,250 acre working sheep farm. The first set was temporary and was dismantled but for subsequent Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, it took months to build a permanent set for just 14 minutes of outside filming that eventually made it into the films. Inside scenes were filmed at studios.

The entrance to the village.

I haven't seen all the films or recognise the 44 hobbit houses but film buffs will be interested so this post is mainly just photos. Behind the doors is just cupboard space to allow access to change the artefacts on window sills.

All the flowers and vegetables in the gardens are all real.

Some of the hobbit holes are life size, but some are smaller to make Gandolf look larger on film and others are larger to make the hobbits played by adult actors, look smaller.

Some of the left overs outside the village's town drunk hobbit hole.

The only fake tree, together with 250,000 artificial leaves imported from Taiwan. Peter Jackson saw them after they had been painstakingly applied by hand and said that they were the wrong colour, so they were individually spray painted the correct colour.

Bag End, at the top of the hill, and according to the story, the wealthier you are, the higher up the hill you live and the set faithfully reproduces this effect with the smaller dwellings at the base and the larger dwellings further up the hill.