But we needed to see it in much more detail, from every angle – and from the inside as well. I had made Helm's Deep the subject of one of the illustrations in the Centenary Edition of the Lord of the Rings, and Peter had broadly approved of that.
One of the major episodes in The Two Towers would be the battle of Helm's Deep and, because Peter wanted plenty of time to plot out those sequences, he asked me to start there on my first day at work in New Zealand. This would enable Peter and the other script writers to think in more detail about the action that would take place in and around those buildings.
My main task initially was to help get the process of building miniatures started by doing drawings of some of the environments, cities, towns and castles that would feature in the films.
Working as a conceptual designer on The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films was intensively collaborative: meetings with the director Peter Jackson every day working alongside fellow designers, sculptors, props-makers, painters, and the visual effects teams. Peter Jackson asked me to start at Helm's Deep on my first day at work in New Zealand
