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ltwilliammowett · 2 years

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Black Dick and the Spithead Mutiny

Admiral of the Fleet Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe (1726-1799) was an extraordinary personality and spent more than 60 years in the service of the Royal Navy. On 16 April 1797 the mutiny began at Spithead, the main naval anchorage near Portsmouth.

Admiral Richard Howe, 1726-99, 1st Earl Howe, by Henry Singleton (1766–1839) (x)

16 ships of the Channel Fleet raised the red flag of insurrection. The demand of the men: a rais in pay, a more equitable distribution of prize money and better victuals. When negotiations broke down between the two sides, King George III personally requested Howe.

And why him? well, he was one of the few officers who treated men well and was always fair, so he was a stalwart of the men's hearts and was even affectionately known as Black Dick. There have been a number of explanations offered for this, his swarthy complexion also known as " Sea Tan" being one and the fact that he never smiled unless a battle was about to begin may be the other one. But back to the Mutiny. Although over 70 and suffering from gout and other ailments, he agreed - but only if his dear wife Lady Howe accompanied him.

Print of a caricature published 9 June, 1797, depicting the Delegates of the mutiny meeting with Admiral Buckner. Richard Parker is the figure on the far-right. (x)

They set out on 10 May on a wild and stormy night and arrived at Portsmouth the following morning. Howe left his wife at the governor's house and immediately set out by barge for Spithead. He came alongsinde HMS Royal George, the headquarters of the insurrection, and despite his infirmities he rejected all offers to help him come aboard and clambered up unaided. He called the ship's company to the quarterdeck and started to talk to them man to man, neither reproaching their conduct nor standing on his dignity. Several hours later he went to HMS Queen Charlotte. For three days he went from ship to ship - talking, listening, heaving his rheumaticky knees and gouty feet up and down ladders until he was so tired he had to be lifted in and out of his boat. But by the end he has achieved reconciliation on both sides, with a Royal pardon for all the mutineers, a reassignment of some of the most unpopular officers and a pay rise and better victualling for the sailor.

On 15 May there was a grand celebration in Portsmouth, and the mutineers' delegates marched in procession up to the governor's house accompanied by bands playing " God Save the King" and " Rule, Britannia". The delegates were invited inside for refreshments, then appeared on the balcony with the Howes to huzzahs from the multitude, after which they set out together for the anchorage. On board Royal George Howe was given three cheers and the red flag of mutiny was pulled down; the other ships quickly followed. Later that day Lord and Lady Howe hosted a special meal for the delegates before they returned to their ships and reported for duty.

#naval history #admiral of the fleet #lord richard howe #mutiny at the spithead #1797 #age of sail

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novelmonger · 7 months

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I'm continuing on to the next LotR audio commentary. This one is with the design team, and there's a lot more people talking in this one! Including:

Grant Major (production designer), Ngila Dickson (costume designer), Richard Taylor (Weta Workshop creative supervisor), Alan Lee (conceptual designer), John Howe (conceptual designer), Dan Hennah (supervising art director/set decorator), Chris Hennah (art department manager), and Tania Rodger (Weta Workshop manager)

So here are some highlights of things that are new to me (after avidly watching all the BTS documentaries multiple times over the years) from FotR:

The guy who made the One Ring originally didn't want to do it because he didn't like fantasy, but then his sons badgered him until he agreed to do it - kind of a similar story to Viggo Mortensen, I think. He ended up contracting cancer and dying during the production of the first movie.

Alan Lee storyboarded a potential sequence for showing how Bilbo got the Ring. They would show Gollum grabbing a fish, taking off the Ring while he ate, and then it would roll away until Bilbo found it.

Some of Ngila Dickson's phrases and diction are pinging really loudly in my sense of deja vu - like, I remember hearing those exact phrases before. But I even went and watched the costume design portion of the Appendices, and none of it was a repeat. Have I actually heard this commentary before and then forgot all about it? @_@

The guy (the primary guy? I can't imagine it was only one person) they put writing on all the scrolls and things worked in a bank and had a hobby doing calligraphy. They hired him to do just a few things at first, putting writing on some props, but then it got to the point where he actually had to quit his job at the bank and start working full-time for LotR, and then continued to do stuff for merchandise for New Line. I do wonder what he did once the movies were all made and over with....

I always forget how they had to have two scales of everything. Not just stuff like Gandalf's staff or the sets, but they had to have two scales of all the props like cups and books and things. They even had to have two different sizes of horses, depending on the scene!

Lawrence Makoare, who played Lurtz, would have to start getting into makeup at 10 p.m. the night before he had a scene, so that he would be ready at 8 a.m. the next day @_@

Most of the horses used in the movies were Andalusian horses imported from Australia.

When they would film outside in nature, like in the forest where they shot on-location scenes for Rivendell, they would have to remove the native plants that were there, keep them in a greenhouse, plant whatever plants and other things they needed for the movie, then take them out again and put the original plants back. This would actually leave the area better than the way they found it, because they would remove weeds and things like that.

John Howe commented on how difficult it is to do hair in something like this that's meant to be kind of "historical," even though it's fantasy. Hairstyle is one of the things that is quickly outdated, so if you do it wrong, it can be jarring to watch the movie in later decades. He said, "I wonder how it will look 20 years from now." It's twenty years later, John. It looks every bit as good as it did in 2001 :')

Okay, I feel like this had to have been in the BTS documentary, but I don't remember it. For the moment where Bilbo goes Gollum-esque for a second when Frodo puts the Ring away, they morphed between his face and a puppet they made of Ian Holm looking deranged. Ian Holm was thrilled with the puppet and had several photos taken of himself with it, and then when it was time for him to leave New Zealand, they made a bronze version of the puppet and gave it to him as a memento! XD

For the shots of the Fellowship bursting out of the snow after the avalanche, they went to the Mt. Hart ski field, which was closed because of a blizzard. They were allowed to go out on the ski field, make snow caves, and film the actors bursting out into the open. The Hobbits wore Ugg boots over their hobbit feet in the snow when their feet wouldn't be in the shot XD Apparently, Richard Taylor actually asked Peter Jackson if there could be a scene of the Hobbits wrapping their feet in bandages or something, just so the actors could protect their feet a bit more in harsh terrain like that, but PJ said no, because the Hobbits' feet would be tough enough to be able to withstand all of that. Poor guys! x.x

Huh. I always assumed that they made the effect of ithildin by putting little glowing lights on the doors of Moria, or else maybe added it in post. But actually, they put some kind of reflective material on the design, and then shone a light from behind the camera, so it would reflect on the design and make it look like it was glowing! I feel like, if this movie were made today, they would totally have just done it with CG, but this makes it so much more realistic. Also, they had to paint the doors, but obviously couldn't paint over the reflective material, so they put plasticine over the design, then painted it, then took the doors to the site. They were still taking the plasticine off the doors when the whole crew and the actors turned up and started rehearsing the scene! So apparently, if you look hard enough, you can actually see a few small parts of the design on the door that are missing, because they accidentally left some of the plasticine on!

Okay, we all know about the crazy amount of attention to detail in these movies, but this story just takes the cake. In the room with Balin's tomb, there's all this Khuzdul writing on the walls. Someone wrote out all the text and had their in-house translator translate it into Dwarvish runes that they then carved into the walls. During one of the days they were shooting the cave troll battle, they had invited a Tolkien language scholar to visit the set, and he stormed out in an outrage, saying that someone had written something like "Joe was here" on the walls, which was disrespectful to Tolkien's legacy, etc. etc. Horrified to hear this, the art department got their translator to go over the set with a fine-tooth comb, trying to find the "graffiti" this guy had seen, because they'd already filmed a lot of shots of this scene, and they knew that there would be fans who would freeze-frame the scene and translate what's written on the walls. But they couldn't find it anywhere! So eventually they cornered the Tolkien scholar and asked him where he'd seen it, and it turned out that it was just some guy on the crew who'd told him that. Apparently, the Tolkien scholar was so uptight and serious about everything, this guy was just poking fun at him, and it snowballed from there. So they ended up wasting a lot of time looking for a mistake that wasn't even there, because that's how dedicated everyone was to getting every detail of this movie right.

The Moria orcs were originally designed to have pale, almost translucent skin (inspired by an axolotl! O.O), but when they saw footage of it on the first day, they realized the contrast with all the darkness in Moria was too much, and it made the orcs look like they were glowing, so they had to make them darker.

The eyes of the Moria orcs were enlarged after the fact, so when they made the prosthetics, they had to make the eyeholes extra big so the eyes would look like they fit after they were enlarged.

Originally, there was an idea that the Balrog would burst out from a wall somewhere while they're trying to jump across the gap in the stairs, and just generally make that scene even more tense and exciting, but then they realized that to do so would basically eat up half their budget, so they decided to do it the way it is in the final version XD

The boats' design was based on a leaf of a lemon tree. If you drop a lemon leaf in the water, it will look like a tiny version of the Elven boats! 8D

Ohhhh, so the scene where the Fellowship gets attacked by Orcs along the way down the Anduin was going to be a sequence at Sarn Gebir, where there are dangerous rapids, so the Fellowship has to land on the shore and carry their boats past. But then Orcs attack, there's a whole action scene, and they have to hurry back onto the water and navigate the rapids. But they never shot it, because right after they'd built the set and got all ready, they were hit with a lot of rain and flooding, and the water level in the lake where they were filming rose five meters and completely washed away the set. So that whole sequence got permanently canceled.

While working on Amon Hen, Alan Lee fell off the stone seat (kind of like Frodo!) and broke his wrist. Thankfully, it was his left wrist, so he could keep drawing.

The Uruk-Hai's hair was horsehair that they had to import because they needed it in such large quantities. In the location where they shot the battle at Amon Hen, the ground was covered with prickly bracken of some kind, so every time an Uruk fell on the ground and then got up for the next take, they would have to carefully pluck all the bits of bracken out of their hair @_@

The fletching on the Uruk arrows is supposed to be, not feathers, but Warg hair O.O

Okay, I knew they made a silicone dummy of Boromir for when his body goes over the falls, but they only had four days to make it?! :O

In the final scene, where Frodo and Sam are looking out over Mordor, what Sean and Elijah were actually looking at was a ski resort with cabins and a ski lift. "The one place in all Middle-Earth we don't want to see," indeed! XD

#lord of the rings #lotr #behind the scenes #gotta say it's MUCH harder to keep track of who's talking when there's so many people @_@#some of them have very distinct voices like richard taylor or john howe #but some of the kiwi accents just kind of blurred everything together and i couldn't tell who was who ^^'

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