Computer Power
Without very powerful computers, CG characters and scenes would be impossible. Animators use CG software to create the characters and position them in each frame. Then, "rendering" computers -- sometimes thousands of them at a time -- create the final shots seen in the movie. Complicated scenes can take up to 48 hours per frame to render, even on the fastest computers.

Animators can use CG techniques to animate almost anything now -- spacecraft, ships (and even the ocean that the ships sail on), people, creatures, giant spiders, explosions, pods, cityscapes. You name it, and chances are that someone has tried to animate it for a movie.

To render Gollum and the many other CG creatures and scenes in "The Lord of the Rings," the animator team used 3,200 computers running 24 hours a day. This array of computers is known as the "RenderWall."

Movie Numbers Here are some stats from the third Lord of the Rings movie, "The Return of the King." Number of CG animators and other special effects (f/x) people working on the movie: 420 Number of people working on the computers for the f/x people: 35 Amount of disk space available to store data and rendered frames: 72 trillion bytes (That's equivalent to the total storage space of 36,000 typical home computers.) Total tape backup space used: 500 trillion bytes